


All The Wrong Places

by garnettrees



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Bones is So Done, Bottom James T. Kirk, Bottom Jim, Dammit Jim, Denial of Feelings, Dens of Iniquity, Hurt James T. Kirk, Hurt Jim, Hurt/Comfort, James T. Kirk Has Issues, Jim is a Little Shit, Kirk Whump, Leonard "Bones" McCoy is a Good Friend, Logic be damned, M/M, Possessive Spock (Star Trek), Protective Spock (Star Trek), Pseudoscience, Psychic Bond, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Service Top, Soul Bond, Soulmates, Surak Left No Instructions For This Shit, T'hy'la, Tarsus IV, Top Spock, Vulcan Culture, Vulcan Kisses, Vulcan Language, Vulcan Mind Melds, prison break - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-10 12:10:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20527826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees/pseuds/garnettrees
Summary: It is a universally accepted truth that, should you have the misfortune to find yourself standing between a Vulcan and their bonded, you need to get thehellout of the way.In a universe where adherents of Surak did not find pacifism logical, galactic society exists under the guidance and regulation of the Vulcan Protectorate. A rule-breaker by nature, Jim Kirk has been practically doomed from day one. Having escaped from the Elba II Clinical Rehabilitation Institute, he knows there is only one being who has ever been able to crack his encryptions or anticipate his moves.As it turns out, Spock's reasons for pursuing him aren't what Jim assumed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I am still working on 'Anywhere on This Road'. This was supposed to be an excuse for astonished-he-likes-subbing!Jim porn, but it both failed _and_ got entirely out of hand. (Spoiler alert: there's no porn here. ^^' Yet.) This is a complete AU, borrowing from both TOS and AOS, so pick your poison. This Jim has a foul mouth, but I've always thought Mirror!Kirk would have sworn like a sailor if not for the NBC censors. He seemed like quite the brawler, too. ;-) 
> 
> **Trigger Warnings:** Depictions of Tarsus (no sexual component), pulp Sci Fi politics/economics that are in no way intended to reflect on anything going on anywhere in the world in RL.  
**Other Trigger Warnings/Enticements:** Shirtless!Jim, possessive/protective Spock, Kirk breaking more logical beings with his shenanigans.

Though he knows he's all but cornered and that his mount is nearly as exhausted as he, Jim Kirk presses onward through the thinning scrubland wastes of Pericolosa VII with a grim and almost mocking tenacity. The smile that occasionally flickers across his handsome though dirty features is one of cynical and determined humor-- the ruefulness of a man about to be executed for insisting that the Earth is round or that the sum of one and one is two. There is no one here to see his expression and he is barely aware of it himself, but still he takes heart from it. His brazen difference, his seemingly innate inability to fit into the placid, well-ordered society of the Vulcan Galactic Protectorate is, at this point, all he has. That, the beast which carries him, and the rags presently shielding him from the worst of Pericolosa's two virulent suns. 

The primary star in this system is a red giant whose atypical brightness casts its smaller blue companion in a haze of optical illusion. The two bodies are so close together that many species, including humans, perceive the secondary sun as a blazing green. The verdant, almost celadon illumination combines with the bloody crimson of the dying star, casting the entire landscape in an ever-shifting, murky brown haze. Jim lost his light-polarizing goggles in the last dust storm, and so now must also contend with the occasional vertiginous lurching of an empty stomach as his eyes struggle with the disorienting surroundings. His dray mount-- a creature whose name in the local tongue is so guttural as to defy human pronunciation-- thankfully has no such difficulty, but it _is_ doubtless almost as hungry as he. It at least had some sustenance as they passed through less desolate environs; Jim has had nothing since he left the planet's single ramshackle spaceport town, and the phaser he'd used to ease certain transactions there was cast aside in an arthritic creek some fifty miles back. There's nothing to hunt in this landscape anyway-- the weapon had become a liability, technology too rare and too easy for the Vulcan dreadnaught to scan for on a backwater rock like this. He'd ditched it in a largely vain hope of diverting his pursuers, but it's a damn shame nevertheless-- the charge was still at ninety-eight percent. 

Jim doesn't _like_ shooting people-- he lacks the sort of violent pathologies citizens are so rigorously screened for in childhood-- and he's rarely been forced to do so. Life under the solicitous, almost ephemeral yoke of the galaxy's Vulcan benefactors is so safe, so predictable and reassuring, that the mere sight of a weapon more sophisticated than a knife terrifies most beings into immediate capitulation. The thoroughly black market treasure had been almost entirely for show, and as insurance against the day Kirk's own unique brand of rebelliousness drove him out into the violent reaches of _Sashavau_. More colloquially known as Out-Space, it is there the broken remnants of Orion, Klingon, and Romulan Empires ferment in a constant state of piracy and feudal warfare, drifting almost as aimlessly as the galactic debris they inhabit. For all his deliberate preparations, despite his harrowing and unwilling suffering on Tarsus IV, Jim is reasonable enough (ha! _logical_ enough) to recognize that he probably doesn't have the mettle to survive in that lawless and bloody region of space. Still, he would have liked to make an attempt. He had been so close, too-- two more star systems and a junker freight Galia swore she had lined up for him, and he would have been headed at Warp 3 far beyond the confines of a civilization that was slowly squeezing the life out of him. Achieving freedom like that is out of the question, now.  
They're going to run him down. 

The _Togolausu_, somewhat snidely referred to as the GOL (Guardians of the Law, or Logic-- take your pick) in Standard, don't scare Jim. He's been picked up so many times, starting about a year or so after the slaughter on Tarsus IV, that he now views them with the weary irritation free-range zoo specimens must feel when they're rounded up and shoved back in a cage for health-checks. Escaping from the Clinical Rehabilitation Institute on Elba II, however, is by far his most serious and high-profile offense to date. Aside from reprogramming the VSA test simulators, which wasn't violent or malicious-- he was just trying to make a point. In the past two hundred years, the only order of execution issued by the Vulcan 'Advisory' Council has been for Kodos and even that was _in absentia_, the assumption being that he died in the final conflagration as he and his collaborators turned on one another. A few mid-level Vulcan psycho-sociologists have made vague-- and easily deniable-- references to the option of 'sanctioning' Kirk for post-mortem medical study but at this point, if he's considered annoying enough for the death penalty, Jim might actually be flattered. Come hell, high water, death, or just another 'rehab' facility to escape from, he's ready to face it. No, it's not the GOL and the recommencement of endless attempts at reform that cause the hot-cold twining about his spine, which Jim chooses to call 'trepidation'. It's not what wakes him in the night, heart pounding, filled with a directionless grasping for something elusive and paradoxically right at hand, sensing a shadow following with tender but unyielding patience just behind his shoulder. 

Only one man-- one _being_\-- managed to crack the layers of encryption and tiers of backstops that obscured Kirk's less than legal network activities, leading to the warrant for his arrest and the abandonment of any pretense at a 'normal' life. Only one mind has ever had any success anticipating his actions, even before Jim spent almost a year as said being's 'ward' on Elba II.  
There are at least three high-ranking GOL lieutenants and a handful of other clinical specialists fanned out across the sector looking for him but Kirk knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, down to the sub-atomic spaces between his own electrons, that Spock is the one presently on his tail.

The pallid brush has thinned to a pittance, leaving only a track of dirt frozen and thawed so repeatedly over centuries that it is little more than loose rock. Steering his animal towards the shattered crags of some bygone geological era, Jim spares a single backward glance for the trail behind him. The planet's facsimile of spring has spared him worst of the suns' heat, if not their more deleterious radiation, but it has also loosened the topsoil enough that the disturbance of the animal's claw-hooves are barely perceptible in the dust. If his pursuers were human, these traces would not matter, but the grand logic of Surak-- no matter distorted the message has become-- cannot wipe away the ancient heritage of Vulcan. They are still creatures of the desert, trained to hunt, track, and maintain hyper-synchronization with their surroundings. They are also trained to fight, for all they claim to never draw first blood. The pacifist facet of Tu'Surak died during the Romulan incursion three centuries after its founding, splitting the nascent revolutionary movement into two branches-- orthodox adherents, and those who accepted the scaffolding of rationality and social control while insisting that failure to defend themselves had all the illogical earmarks of racial suicide. No prize for picking the winner in _that_ fight. Take all that blood-thirsty passion, ages untold of breeding for survival and wit, and focus it through the prism of detached analysis and exacting behavioral standards? Ah, there's the powerful cultural animus that has blasted through the galaxy, and all has bowed in its wake. For only when they had enforced peace and order as far beyond their homeworld as was sustainable, argued these counter-apologists of Reform, could the Vulcan people temper their warlike vigilance with science, technology, and objective rationality.

That their expanding territory did not become trapped in the untenable state of empire or devolve into any number of perverse martial political systems is an improbability no other species could likely achieve. The Vulcans attained the ideal they set out for; they reached Tu'Surak by routes circuitous and counter-intuitive. Ruthlessly sane, they have honed their aggression into a tool of surgical precision, which they further obscure to 'civilized' levels with layers of elaborate ritual. No creature in the quadrant understands Vulcans, but all are ruled by them-- albeit in a distant, regulatory manner which has known no equal in any history. That the last military skirmish (Earth's brief but fervent attempt to resist patronage, Jim thinks with a kind of limping pride) is not to their credit, at least in Kirk's mind. An authoritarian parent may boast that their children do not fight, but that peace is meaningless if the children must be constantly be monitored to ensure it.  
More worthless still if the tutelage is endless, and no one can ever grow up to fend for themselves. 

A rule-breaker by nature (granted, mostly of those rules which exist only for their own sake or simply fail to make sense), Jim has been practically doomed from word 'go'. Now he's running out of options, scraping at the bottom of the barrel for diversionary tactics whose lack of sophistication irks his inner strategist. 'If it's stupid but it works, kid,' an echo of Bones advises, 'then it ain't so stupid.' There's a narrow crevasse between two of the midsized outcroppings, like a crumbling gate to the mountainous region beyond. He halts the animal just paces from the opening, swinging down in an expert dismount that lands his feet squarely and firmly despite the creature's height, avoiding also the impressive spines on its elongated hind legs. There's a vague impression of a kangaroo about it, at least to the Terran eye, if said being were cursed with a greenish hide and the flat-faced wrinkles of a bulldog. Panting, obviously grateful for the opportunity to rest, the mount looks at Jim with wide back eyes, oval ears pressed together against its skull like spoons. The rocky foothills and jagged peaks are far from its native environs-- if he lets it loose, it will instinctively head south, looking for the water-rich lichen which grow at the base of most shrubs. That same lichen absorbs an arsenic-heavy compound from the surrounding soil as part of a symbiotic relationship with the larger vegetation; the animal, being native, has two stomachs with which to process and filter out the poison. It's an adaptation Jim very much envies just at present. 

Kirk's personal record for going without water is four days and fifteen hours, and that was many years ago. Right now, he's at a little over seventy-two hours without hydration, and he can already see the purplish hue creeping up from his cuticles. The headache pounding with forceful resonance in behind his sinus cavity and in his temples is both hated and familiar; he can function through that pain-- the waves of protesting stomach cramps, the mounting cognitive impact-- but not for much longer. The unwholesome feeling of piloting his body rather than _inhabiting_ it is also known to him, a thing of lunacy so potent it has continued to surface periodically in his night terrors. In a way, he's surprised he's still standing-- it's distantly satisfying to be this stubborn, but it almost doesn't matter now. He can't fight like this, can't run. Once he lets the pack-beast slip its lead, hiding is going to be his only option. 

Far in the distance, Jim's already strained and weary eyes can just discern a wavering cloud of dust and heat-shimmer. Barely a blip on the horizon, but growing larger by minute degrees. To the untrained, it looks like a dervish might be trying to kick up, but Jim knows better. One or more Trip-X352's-- streamlined, bullet-shaped cabs suspended in their own concentric, miniature anti-grav spheres-- hovering and rushing over the landscape like low-flying birds. On civilized worlds there's almost no beating them, but it takes time to tweak the tech to handle more extreme environments _and_ you have to have a permit (a regulation with which good ol' Scotty, his neighbor on Elba II, was at constant odds). Here on the ass-end of the galactic rim, no one has bothered yet. Actually, Kirk had been hoping that the magnetic irregularities caused by the planet's eccentric poles might render the vehicles next to useless, but he should have known Spock would be able to make them serviceable on the fly. Idly, he wonders which snooty little VSA charlatan will try to hijack the half-Vulcan's patent _this_ time. It's happened before.

The GOL got about this close to him two days ago-- at that point, Jim's hide had only been saved thanks to the same powerful dust storm that cost him is goggles. A fair enough trade, but he's not going to get that lucky a second time. Knowing there's nothing for it, he stretches up to reach his pathetic saddlebag, empty save for the wrappers of his by-gone rations. Unzipping it halfway, he looks down at himself with bleak amusement. Only the permahide trousers he picked up on Capella Prime have survived his trek in the wilderness, and at this point they could probably stand up on their own. His paenula, once draped poncho-like over his shoulders, has been reduced to to little more than rags clinging to the braided collar. Nodding to himself, he tears a sizable segment free, tucking it into the creature's harness. Then, unhooking the reigns, he gives the animal a solid thump on the hindquarters for good measure. As expected, it rears to test its new freedom, turns, and dashes off southward with renewed drive, seeming almost to bleat its thanks as it goes. The bag, thumping unheeded against its side, spills forth the occasional scrap of trash in its wake-- along with, hopefully, enough of Jim's scent to make for a serviceable decoy. Even if the ploy works, Kirk has no idea how he'd double back to port once the GOL are on the wrong trail. Right now, he's taking this one step at a time. The half-hearted planetary surveys he's had to go by are at least a hundred years old and-- sadly, in this case-- were not carried out by punctilious Vulcans. Reliable or no, the cartography didn't indicate any sentient habitation beyond this rocky portion of waste, and he can't see how there could be anything worth crossing it for. Still, he considers in an effort to galvanize himself, it provides cover-- and there might be a spring hidden somewhere amidst the maze of narrow canyons.  
'_And I have a tame Gorn that prances on command to the tune of 'The Sugar Plum Fairy_,' he thinks ruefully, beginning a climb slowed by both his physical condition and the cracking soles of boots that saw better days two hundred and fifty light-years ago. 

Jim doesn't dare venture too far into the rugged and broken terrain, trying to balance tactical advantage with common sense. It becomes increasingly apparent that the twisted passages are disorienting and seemingly endless-- a challenge to navigate even if his mind were firing on all cylinders. Forcing himself to avoid any obvious shelter, he continues tearing strips from his paenula, planting them in ancient cracks or tossing them, wadded-up and weighted down with pebbles, into shallow gullies. Then, quite literally retracing his steps by using the same footholds, he strikes off in the opposite direction as quickly as he can. He holds off until he comes to the fifth probable-looking cave mouth, climbing in just beyond where the shadows bleed into genuine darkness. It's cool inside, but refreshingly so, and there's a loose bolder large enough to provide both concealment and support. 

Even as he crouches in its shelter, eyes adjusting to the gloom rapidly in relief against Pericolosa's outré daylight, he knows this brief respite could easily prove deadly. Sheer momentum has carried him this far, his stubborn and well-honed will to survive fueling him to push past his body's complaints. He has more stamina and pain-tolerance than most, especially in this era of ease and plenty, but he's still only human. The damning phrase makes him snort bemusedly, considering all the ways a broader interplanetary context has changed the meaning of the old phrase. There are plenty of situations for which humans are more advantageously adapted than others (get a Vulcan near water or ask a Ferengi to run long distances and you'll find that out real fast), but this isn't one of them. Even in peak condition, he's no match for his pursuers-- who are not only stronger and desert bred, but have better fast-twitch muscle reflexes, to boot. It's Jim's mind, his unpredictability and skill for pivoting mid-plan, that is his greatest asset, and right now thinking _hurts_. It's as though pain, too, has been tracking him with malicious single-minded focus across the waste, far more closely at heel than the GOL. Its grieves and shackles are all about him in the form of agonizing muscle cramps and the numbness of his hands. It feels as though there are tiny, granular spikes of glass between his very neurons; his tongue and throat have forgotten the concept of moisture exists. The rest he craves so desperately is really his body's desire to shut down. All the lights off now, baby-- we're gonna do this run dark and silent. The hyper-vigilance that served so well as armor is fading, his senses unable to maintain such a high level of fight-or-flight preparedness for so extended a time.  
He still struggles against the urge to close his eyes because, as in all other things, he never goes down without a fight.

In spite of himself, Jim drowses in the shadowed alcove, the depths of the cave itself silent and black as pitch. Daylight lasts seventeen or nineteen hours here (he can't remember-- it's a prime number, anyhow) and, while he never truly sleeps, he passes into a state of nightmarish hypnogogia that seems to last far longer than the minute movement of the suns would imply. It seems almost as if those two bright unequal orbs, like uneven pupils in a concussion victim, have come to a stand-still. There's a suffocating sense of being trapped in a möbius strip; he has come so far, run so stubbornly, only to fold back over into the boy he was fifteen years ago. Is he hiding in a cave, or is he still concealed in an overturned transport with a dozen rotting corpses, waiting without a single breath to see if the sound of dreaded jackboots will pass him by? Looking down the corridor of his life, Kirk catches that boy's eye, holds his gaze and knows they are thinking the same thing. He's not sorry for snarling, biting, and lashing out against the snare he was born into anymore than the tiger, who paces the cage waiting for a moment of inattention to maul its way free, can feel contrition. 

Jim's citizenship on Earth is a matter of inheritance only. He's a space-brat, through and through; a child of Jeffries' tube playgrounds, sonic showers, replicated meals, and the great metal jungle-bowels of Engineering. His earliest memory is of sitting on his mother's shoulders, accidentally pulling on her sensible sable bun as he reached for a tool lost on some tight, high gap between gangways. For three generations, the Kirks had hauled cargo on the Alpha Quadrant's 3BJ77 run-- Earth to Perseus, Perseus to Cygnus, and back again. The _Irish Pride_, their Valare-class freighter (so called because the things lasted forever if you took care of them right) hauled specialized equipment, rare chemical compounds, and any luxury commodities they could tuck into left over corners, to star bases and planets alike. The life was a curious mix of monotonous routines and well-worn flight patterns combined with the constant rigors and unpredictability of space travel itself. The unknown lay with them cheek-to-cheek, yet the rotation of destinations-- the well-ordered Vulcan star bases, the motley marketplaces of a hundred Protectorate worlds, the civilian stations that grew like coral reefs floating in the void-- never changed. Sometimes, Jim and his father would sit together in the cockpit, deep into 'ship's night', and sketch theoretical courses on the nav-computer. They would plot voyages that skirted the edges of charted space, dipping past the out-worlds where the Vulcan Protectorate's grasp grew slightly more tenuous, if no less obdurate about its goal. 

(_They'd never follow through, of course. Even by the age of six, Jim had been knocking around the carefully delineated space-ways long enough to realize how little Vulcan trusted the 'junior' races with interstellar flight, though achieving such was a prerequisite for first contact and absorption into the Protectorate. All travel within the borders of the civilized galaxy was at the sufferance of the founding benefactors-- no deviations, no sudden decisions, no time unaccounted for. That voice-- many voices, yes, but one in their passionless uniformity-- from the comm unit: **'You have violated established allowance for variation. Correct and explain.'**  
Stay off the grass, don't cross against the lights, no running in hallways, shake well before opening, Jesus-Christ-gimme-a-break!_)

Traversing voids so inhospitable to life would never be without risk, but the quotidian presence of technology masked the ever-present danger until it was highlighted only at the most irregular and unexpected of times. It lulled you into a false sense of security, did the Black; if Earth's seas had been characterized as a tempestuous woman, then space was an ever-watchful, amorphous predatory beast. The homing beacons of other ships which might suddenly go dark on the board; the freighters wiped out or left to float dead and helpless by cosmic radiation or spacial anomalies; the once-thriving star base you arrived at to find running on a less-than-skeleton crew because some new virus had torn through the personnel. Or the EVA suit that was brand-spankin' new, bought because the old one had been repaired more times than anyone wanted to remember, but turned out to be defective in approximately one in 1.3 million odds.

The family enterprise had always run barely in the black. The galactic economy-- kept in strict stasis by Vulcan-- guaranteed steady income, but protection against the tough times came at the price of any conceivable business boom. There was never an opportunity to take advantage of high demand and bank increased profits against the unexpected. Winona Kirk didn't just lose her husband on that fateful crossing; she lost the entire time-sensitive cargo and three regular contracts because of the disaster. Settlement money from the death inquest allowed them to limp along but, with nothing substantive to fall back on, they existed in a precarious balancing act waiting for each cycle's allotment to come through. For three more years, the remaining family scrabbled, scrimped, and cut corners, with Sam and Jimmy taking on as many tasks as their age and experience would allow, thus avoiding the hire of outside personnel. They stretched their credit as far as it would go, beat doors down in every merchant quarter in an attempt to drum up business but, in the end, there was nothing left to do but let the _Irish Pride_ go to the highest bidder. 

There was Sustainability Allowance, of course-- the largesse of galactic stability and the precepts of Surak ensured that no one was left to starve, but there were significant obligations that came with such resources. There was food and board and training, oh yes indeed. But there were also evaluations, assigned career paths, compliance checks, and the knowledge that everything, from where you lived to who you bred with, was subject to review and dismissal without appeal. Sam, by then a manifestly rebellious teenager tired of nomadic life, signed himself over to the Commission of Sentient Resources in spite of-- or perhaps because of-- these things, his parting shot an observation that Vulcan bureaucrats could hardly make poorer choices for him than his own mother had.  
As far as Jim knows, Sam is presently a biochemist on Denevra, three years in to a permanent marriage contract with a 'mentally compatible' preselected mate whose genetic profile should assist him in producing intellectually superior offspring.

Stunned by these successive losses, wandering like a somnambulist amidst the crowding and clutter of planet-side life, Jim's mother had seized on the news of an actual colonization effort on the fringes of Protectorate space-- the first since Vulcan had taken Earth under its auspices. Typically, the conquerer's 'logic' that has entwined itself with Tu'Surak dictates that only habitable systems prepared for contact be absorbed into the greater union; after all, it is from these systems the threat of invasion and/or destabilizing influences stem. Vulcans themselves are not particularly prone to exploration, believing that enough empirical evidence exists within the known galaxy to-- with enough dedication and computing power-- eventually extrapolate the rest of existence. To take a planet or moon for the sake of expansion alone is rare. It was security Vulcan lusted for, not territory. Yet, more astonishing still, _this_ particular effort was led by a coalition of Andorian, Terran, and Denebolan activists. They proposed, with all due respect, an experiment: that provisional autonomy be granted, on this single world, to test the lessons Vulcan had been so kind as to teach. It was the sort of opportunity George Kirk would have leapt at-- the closest thing to adventure possible in a society where innovational risks had been managed almost into extinction. 

Jim can still remember-- and G-d, it would be so much easier if he couldn't, if starvation and terror had managed to wipe the early days away-- the slowly evolving sprawl of their little town, surrounded by freshly planted fields and wilderness beyond, trees of eternal autumn as far as the eye could see. The grant gave the colonial coalition five years to create a 'meaningful, orderly settlement' before the ever-pedagogical Vulcans would step in to fix the folly which was surely inevitable whenever less disciplined races were left to their own devices. The colonists had barely half so long before the fungus began to eat away at what they'd built, bringing with an additional rot of bloodshed and chaos. Now the only thing on Tarsus with any meaning is the black obelisk, inscribed on every inch of its surface with the seemingly endless names of those executed, those sacrificed, and the starved whose bones still litter the ruined fields. Perhaps the marker is not for them-- for how can a single stone, however large, suffice to represent the degradation of sentience and claim for those victims some semblance of dignity in death? No, more likely it is a tombstone for the sprawling dream of gradual independence which died too, on that world.  
From now until all record and memory dies, Vulcan will be able to cite the Tarsus disaster as proof that they are the only beings rational enough to rule.

If his life is supposed to be flashing before his eyes (and there's a shit-show no one would pay to sit through the _first_ time), then Jim is once again breaking the rules. What comes to him next is not the aftermath of surviving Tarsus and a direct encounter with Kodos the Executioner, but events of more than a decade later-- his time on Elba II. He sees the disturbing, consistently blunted curves of architecture, the dura-glass partitions of his accommodations which left him constantly exposed to more than just video surveillance; the gradations of gray-blue, dull aqua, and sage green employed in carpeting, exterior walls, furniture, and clothing as per their 'soothing', anxiety-reducing effects on 92% of all sentient beings. Here are clean cover-alls, Mr. Kirk, which cannot be torn for purposes of harm. Here are the network-isolated PADDs and blunt rubber styluses you cannot make mischief with. Everything has been provided for: regular meals and health checks, mentally stimulating but innocuous work (should you choose), with strolls in the arboretum and carefully monitored community time, all precisely calculated to fit the needs of your species. He was told he was not a prisoner or a lab rat but a _patient_, and a helpful participant in a scientific study as well. Supposedly, less than 0.0003% of Protectorate citizens were dissatisfied with the peaceful, predictable nature of their society. Of that vanishingly small minority, most had obvious illnesses and pathologies to explain their dangerous behavior and failure to integrate and, of these, many responded to medical and psychiatric treatments of varying degrees. They functioned, discontent perhaps but not overtly disruptive. There were hopeless cases: _they_ were housed in the North Ward, kept relatively calm with tranquilizing but not incapacitating drugs, displayed like objets d'art. Garth, the sociopathic would-be dictator; Marta, the sexual sadist; Jevrak Sa'Jevrak, who murdered children to keep his other proclivities a secret. Droxine, the patricidal narcissist; Shinzard the paranoid schizophrenic who feigned (or perhaps not) multiple personalities; Jame Finney and Alexander Marcus with their violent but radically different dissociative disorders. 

Stranger still than these exotic specimens of nearly extinct abnormal psychology are Jim and the merry little band of misfits he left behind in the South Wing. To call it the 'non-violent' ward could at times be a bit of a misnomer (especially when Kirk was involved), but they had never actively sought to hurt others or perpetuate their own delusions. They just… didn't fit. They could not be made to _want_ to fit-- not for any of the rewards society so often used to induce compliance, not for many amount of traditional psychiatric or telepathic therapy, not even for their freedom. Those granted provisional release invariably trespassed again, often quite obliviously, and these examples were frequently cited to show the impossibility of further progress towards a 'cure'. What else can be done, save ensuring these aberrations do not infect more stable beings with their peculiarities? Willfully overwriting or changing the mind of another sentient being is _kae'at k'lasa_, mental rape, a crime so repugnant it remains one of the few causes for the death penalty. 

Jim's neighboring patient had been Scotty, whose mania for invention, 'tinkering' and discovery had finally caused more friction and consternation amongst his professors (already envious of his obvious brilliance) than they were willing to put up with. As it turned out, scientists-- particularly _Vulcan_ scientists-- did not appreciate it when someone blithely broke the laws of physics, never mind any actual patent regulations. On the other side, far more conversational when not haranguing the Vulcan staff over their 'reductive, pig-headed addiction to dangerous profiling and the status quo' was Leonard McCoy, whose vindictive wife had taken her accusations of paranoia and irrational phobias all the way to the Lower Vulcan Judiciary, all that she might gain sole custody of their daughter. And on down the line, transparent walls only ever dimmed to the opaque for medical exams and the extremely rare clinical meld; not a moment of privacy to rail at the universe or laugh at it in dismay, to weep over the astonishingly narrow Protectorate definition of sanity, or even just take yourself in hand for a wank. (Unless you were Finnegan who, on the latter subject, had no shame and a hyper-competitive desire that all be impressed by his endowments. Jim, though no slouch himself, took perverse delight in reminding the arrogant charlatan that it isn't necessarily what you _have_, but what you do with it.) 

Chekov was a mathematical genius and would-be teenage Lothario who had made the mistake of drafting an entirely new equation in warp physics, revolutionizing the field and overturning conventional models. (Again, academics of all stripes seemed united in their disapproval of those who went about destabilizing paradigms.) 'Pasha' and Scotty, situated at opposite ends of the hall for all the obvious reasons, spent most of the day shouting formulas back and forth at one another about vulgar functions, convergent expressions, and asymptotic limits. Jim would chime in occasionally, but he refused to take sides. There were more than a dozen others, including a Tellarite, two Andorians, two Risans, a Betazoid, and three feathery sylphs from the Pleiades who claimed to be in direct mystical contact with a godlike intelligence inhabiting the Galactic Core. 

It seems, however, that _homo sapiens sapiens_ are proportionally the primary offenders when it comes to disruption and disorderly conduct-- a common denominator the Vulcan staff views with an almost exasperated disgust. What can be done about it? The trial 'parole' cases had been a failure (thank you, Scotty), so everyone on Elba II knew they weren't going anywhere, whether or not they had an actual tangible crime to their name. Jim thanks a litany of obscure and mostly-tongue-in-cheek deities every day for the taboo surrounding _kae'at k'lasa_. He isn't sure who views it with greater terror. Psi-null beings, who can only quail in absolute revulsion at the results, or the telepathic species who understand each and every obscene aspect of the violation. Even the doctors and orderlies posted to the galactic version of Saint Elsewhere knew they were serving out their own sentences, in a way, their relegation stemming from some perceived slight or breach of protocol fathomable only within their closed society. 

(_'Exposure to paragons of the wacky and 'illogical', such as ourselves, is supposed to help them better appreciate the serenity and self-mastery Tu'Surak offers.' Bones would often remark, making sure to pitch his voice so it would echo all throughout the open floor-plan. 'Though, to be honest, Jimmy,' he'd drawl teasingly, 'as punishments go, you may be a bit more than even they deserve.'_)

Perhaps Kirk should feel guilty. Perhaps, in a way, he is a traitor, because the faces of the fellow inmates he befriended-- the inmates he offered, however obliquely, to include in his plans-- are not among the images that automatically come to mind when he thinks of the institution, or even the recent past in general. Nor has the persistent countenance in his dreams been any of their number. 

Instead, he must suffer himself to be haunted by Spock, the warden and governor-magistrate of their cozy little nuthouse. Whatever else might be said about him, the being-- young amongst Vulcans, a little older than Jim from Terran perspectives-- was an unusual example of the administrative beast. Though distrusted by the ambivalent patients, he never the less caused no true enmity (save for Bones, who objected to him first on principle and then some odd show of protectiveness towards Kirk), never once abusing his power indulging in the petty little humiliations that seemed the lifeblood of the bureaucratic class. Vulcans could claim otherwise, but Jim had seen enough of the breed across species, and he knew quite well that the supposed dispassion of logic often served to disguise sheer callousness. Spock might easily have been a tyrant; adherence to Tu'Surak, orthodox or otherwise, never seemed to preclude displays of alpha posturing, though they came in varying degrees of subtlety. Stonn, for example, enjoyed every prosaic opportunity at his disposal-- be it calling patients in from the garden areas thirty seconds early (_their_ time-sense was not so refined as his) to lengthy inquisitions during the weekly sweep for contraband. It didn't matter how minuscule the detail-- if he had seen you favor a dish and it was up on the replicator, then you were called to meals dead last. If you spent too much time in the company of certain persons during the 'dedicated socialization period', you would find either them or yourself suddenly on the opposite rotation. Stonn was just 'a bad apple' as McCoy put it-- he'd come out of the womb pissed off and resentful, never mind that he had far less reason to complain about 'an intellectually numbing position far breath proven skills' than Spock did.

Everyone knew the magistrate of Elba II was a member of the House of Surak; that he was regarded as a brilliant and nigh-on indispensable independent contractor for the VSA's Data Integrity and Incident Response team; that he filled his position as essential warden of their little zoo impeccably and still had time for said free-lance work and other research. Yet they knew also that-- beyond the surface respect due his lineage and position-- Spock was all but shunned by the rest of the Vulcan staff, who looked on his mixed heritage with disdain. Something similar was rumored to have occurred during the review of his application to the Vulcan Science Academy-- otherwise, he would have worked directly for them, instead of being relegated to an auxiliary position that ensured his name was credited dead last on every research project no matter how much of the work he shouldered himself. That slim but determined Vulcan streak of xenophobia is like the contamination of some isolated village well-- understood by all, never discussed, while the water is still consumed because there is no other source. Arsenic poisoning, was McCoy's comparison. Low levels could be tolerated, but it built up in the system. Someday, the former doctor prophesied with his typical resignation to the general folly of all sentient beings, it was going to come to a head. 

Nevertheless, it is not unheard of for Vulcans to take a mate from another species. Their perpetually low birthrate has been somewhat improved by regular infusions of new genetic material, one of the less recognized benefits of their sovereignty. They are, besides, moved by strange impulses whenever they select a partner-- prone to atypical behavior and shows of possessive devotion that are otherwise unheard of. This is never spoken of, the incidents being so utterly ignored by on-lookers and even unintentional participants as to be _willed_ out of existence. For all their cataloguing of races under their charge, Vulcans themselves are an intensely private people-- a secrecy is was both culturally innate and strategically valuable. What is not known cannot be exploited by one's enemy. What, precisely, occurs in their closed society is a mystery so complete there is little upon which to even base rumor, and it is generally agreed amongst every other species that such things do not bear speculation or scrutiny. It is enough to be wary of unfathomable accidental offenses, approaching every interaction with caution, for when a Vulcan is intrigued by an outsider their interest is… avid. Often, the recipient of these attentions is utterly perplexed as to how they might have inspired such fascination which-- while tightly leashed, at least in the public arena-- can only be described as _'ardor'_.  
Of course, no proposal has ever been refused. 

(_Fear and/or enlightened self-interest can easily explain the capitulation, but there _are_ other theories. Not even whispered, these rumors are things of round-about intimation-- that Vulcans are not merely telepaths but a sort of psychic-vampire, with a mating drive as fierce and carefully regulated as their aggression. They go about gloved because only certain 'auras' or beings are suited to their tastes, though they maintain a constant low-level awareness that alerts them to those they pursue. In the Protectorate, you do not watch a Vulcan's hands, you do all you can to avoid unnecessary interactions or the much-feared 'clinical meld', and you do _not_ allow an expression to cross your face if someone-- usually incredibly intoxicated-- implies that the galaxy's logical overseers are also masters of sensuality and sexual enthrallment, no matter how incongruous or laughable to idea might seem._)

Whether they could personally tolerate him or not, the unwilling patients on Elba II were forced to acknowledge that Spock was the lesser of all the other available evils. But G-d, didn't it gall Kirk that such a punctilious, impeccable representative of The System should be the one-- the _only_ one-- to untangle the multi-lingual cryptograms layered over every line of his executable code. And he didn't stop there, the damned even-featured and serene walking advertisement for orthodox Tu'Surak! Spock devised the very network injection attack that traced and connected Jim's unremarkable (in fact, deliberately subpar) public persona with that of the 'hacktivist' Kirok. 

Trapped in the chaotic half-sleep of the exhausted and hyperaware, Jim is intimately and uncomfortably alone with the composite of images and impressions that form his perception of Spock. The layers have the mental texture of nacre, variations inviting the discernment of touch, colors of nameless profusion hiding in the polished surface. What he had faced first as just another in a long line of obstacles and inquisitors quickly became… something else entirely. 

(_"Ah," Jim said, a slow insouciant smile coming to his face only five minutes into their first formal interview. "So the VSA tests I reprogrammed-- they were yours."_

_ "Two of them were, yes." The thrice-damned captor was utterly composed, voice like some deep medieval canticle written to melodic but dogmatic standards. A being of such innate and sparing elegance that Kirk was torn between artistic appreciation and his own instinct to stir the unexpected. It will never leave him, this particular response to Spock-- the impulse to dig and scrabble in the ice, to press his hands against that prodigious glacial control and mar its perfection with his own vitality, just _knowing_ truly galvanic forces lay within. _

_ "That explains it," the human nodded to himself, stretching-- though the bland coveralls did no favors-- languorously, that he might show his form to best advantage. Utterly lost of a Vulcan, of course, but he knew his own sometimes brazen sexuality could often confuse and discomfit beings who did not respond to conventional attractions. "You're a sore loser."_

_ "Indeed not," Spock replied and, though Kirk watched the magistrate's expression with all the rapt attention of a sorcerer for their scrying bowl, he did not yet possess the skill to read very far. "Instead, I find my scientific curiosity simultaneously stimulated on two divergent paths."_

_ It occurred to Jim to ask for a repetition of the word 'stimulated' whilst sweeping his own pink tongue slowly across his lips. He rejected the idea with faint regret, instead mirroring his inquisitor's demeanor. "And will you enlighten me as to these areas of possible exploration? Just where do you intend to probe?" So he couldn't _entirely_ help himself. _

_ "I find myself as intrigued by how you infiltrated and compromised the VSA's systems as I am by _why_ you did so. Your actions had no violent intent or discernible political statement, nor was the impact of your attack lasting. I must confess your motives escape me."_

_ "Hmm," Jim grunted, not particularly interested in this approach and not at all hesitant about showing as much. "Ah, yes, Kirk the Curiosity. Come see this strange, rare creature from the recesses of irrational human deviance. You know," he said quietly, leaning forward as though confiding a great secret, "I have also been trained to play a passable version of Pachelbel's Canon on an octave's worth of bicycle horns, using only my nose."_

_ An eyebrow shot up, not an unusual mannerism for a Vulcan, though the angle and height of this one seemed to somehow push protocol. It was not the occipital sector of Spock's epicranial muscles that concerned Jim in that moment, but the still area around his mouth. Something obscure had changed in the way those lips were held; it was not the aborted twitch of a smile or even its ghost, but a thing far more mystifying-- utterly free of cruelty or mockery, evoking some answering response which Kirk himself could not name. It seemed possible that there simply was no standard word for it, that it was not a feeling or response or tacenda human beings could understand. Jim's fingers ached as though he had been presented with the universe's most complex, concentric mirrored puzzle box.  
They hadn't even **started** playing chess yet._)

Dreaming-- knowing that he's dreaming, peeling away at the film even as it threads through the projector-- Jim finds himself opposite Spock in the spartan magistrate's office, with its luxury of real opaque walls and the faintest hint of incense, the tri-D chess set on the desk between them. Done in the typical Vulcan style, the room is not white or carefully carved or relentlessly bright-- the walls, while still pre-fab, are a charcoal gray punctuated by hangings of deep burgundy and aged black-gold which look austere despite their obvious quality. Tea on the portable burner, PADDs in an orderly but obvious state of use, arabesques of fluid geometry and calligraphy renderings of Surak's maxims hung between the shelves. Jim's hand is near his cup; a vessel of indigo pottery that is actually _breakable_, that could (if he were so… crass?) be reduced to dangerous shards.

(_'Gettin' awful cozy, aren't we?' McCoy drawled the day three hours lapsed before the 'attendants' returned Jim to his own accommodations. Bones didn't even know how much of that time had been spent in conversation, that the game was yet unfinished._)

In marked variance to waking life, however, the door at Jim's back-- a solid slab of dura-steel responsive only to voice-print authorization-- is open wide. It should therefore spill bright, antiseptic light into the otherwise understated room, but the illumination it provides is still natural, the near crepuscular glow of a sun sinking beyond an endless forested horizon. _Tarsus_ is out there, as it was in the beginning. Jim can even smell the freshly turned soil. That's the poison, the invisible catalyst that allows memories to spread like cancer in its waves of attack and remission, because… he did love that place, once. That's what makes the betrayal complete, like a beautiful and vivacious woman whose corpse is left to putrefy until the maggots and stench of liquefaction eradicate all recollection of who she was in life.

Kirk finds his left hand is toying idly with a captured pawn-- a common enough occurrence, but _Spock_ is not behaving as he would in life. He is saying that Jim may go, even as he contradicts himself with a careful but implacable grip on the human's wrist. The touch is rare and of too long a duration to be anything but illusory, yet Jim can feel the leather stretched like a second skin over each knuckle and fingertip.

Spock says he may go and Jim wants to argue, because it's Tarsus out there, no matter how picturesque-- and the end of that story is always the same. The ash, the smell of hair burning, of the baking of certain flesh which should not make you hungry but-- G-d help and G-d damn you and G-d blast you from existence so you never have to know this about yourself-- it _does_. Also, Kirk isn't stupid; he learned quid pro quo in the School of Hard Knocks, and he knows there's always a catch. Eminently reasonable, as inhumanly beautiful as a statue of some ominous underworld prince, Spock acknowledges this is true. Jim can go, he may walk through the door and be physically free, but only if…  
if…  
_only_ if…

* * * * * *

It must be some sound which startles Jim into full wakefulness, a state all the more uncomfortable for the buzz and vivid rendering of adrenaline. Someone has disturbed a loose rock in this treacherous maze or taken an ill-considered step. The murky marsh-light of the suns has not moved perceptibly at the mouth of the cave, nor has the temperature changed; Kirk himself is psi-null (almost unusually so, even for a human), and so he firmly sets aside the sense of some incongruously warm shadow drawing nearer. A fire raging with stealthy quiet, whispering persuasively that it will not burn despite its hunger. Yet what else, Jim wonders-- far down in the subcutaneous land of instinct and intuition, where truths grow unimpeded by the light of conscious thought-- does fire _do_?

Working furiously to slough off the effects of inertia and his own dazed perceptions, Kirk willfully stretches his protesting muscles and, wedging himself against the bolder which sheltered him during his unfortunate stupor, crouches on the balls of his feet. His breathing is soundless, the stillness of his form remarkable but, for a long while, he hears nothing. Whatever error or misstep his pursuers made is not repeated. Once more, adrenaline jams down his dehydrated nerve-endings. He pushes it down, controlling and harnessing the flow. Vulcans do not proselytize for Tu'Surak and they certainly do not share their meditation and pain-blocking techniques, but Jim encountered a whole slew of doctors and psychiatrists following his rescue from Tarsus. How strange they had seemed, those clean and confident professionals who were so convinced they knew what had happened, that reading endless reports and watching aftermath vid-footage could somehow convey the subhuman horror of Kodos' regime. They'd used words like 'healing', 'processing', and 'coping'. Jim viewed their attempts to assist him with the sort of polite but unsuccessfully disguised disdain of a 'civilized' explorer watching the superstitious antics of a tribe they considered primitive and barely sentient. For all the Terran meditation techniques he's been subjected to, he's never achieved a moment's serenity (or even a great deal of tolerance for simply sitting still), but the ability to regulate certain subconscious functions _has_ proven useful. The bright and brilliant edge of risk is coming, the event horizon of conflict and aggression that will bring him fully into the moment, as determinedly _alive_ as any predator in the wild.  
For now though, he must wait, and get a sense of the other pieces on the board.

Finally, another sound does come-- this one, deliberate. A powerful, modulated voice, the echoing maze of canyons only increasing its native grandeur. 

"**James Tiberius Kirk**!"

The baritone, a woodwind somehow mixed with the great tolling of a bell, settles and vibrates against Jim's bones. He fists his hands against it, wanting to laugh-- to _roar_\-- at the sheer inevitability of the confrontation. Spock is down in the narrow passage beneath the lip of the cliff cave. He is down there, and likely even more still and controlled than his quarry, knowing he need look no further. The Vulcan does not say 'I know you are here' because he quite logically would not waste the initial effort if he were not already absolutely certain. He will not come in after Kirk, but neither will he leave. Spock will simply wait, the only completely immovable object known to Jim's unstoppable force. 

The fugitive waits a full five minutes, refusing to be rushed or ordered about. Then, fully aware that it is difficult to look imposing with a wreath of rags around one's neck, he tears away the remaining collar of his shirt and rises to his feet. The ruined fabric is tucked into the waistband of his permahide trousers (you never discard resources, no matter how paltry) and, as he makes a quick survey for a path down that will not force him to expose his back, he hunts amidst the cave-mouth's abundant rocks and selects a hefty piece of shale. It will likely break on impact with the denser Vulcan bone structure, but it will still convey concussive force if wielded properly. Despite the little preparations he's making, Kirk is forced to admit that, for the first time in a long while, he cannot envision the possible outcomes of this scenario as he normally does. It's as if he's about to walk straight off a cliff. 

Keeping that image strictly metaphorical, he ends up sliding down the steep but serviceable slope east lip of the cave, rather than climbing back down from the west, the way he came. His landing isn't impressive, but it's not embarrassing or undignified either. (_'Your vanity is breathtaking,' McCoy's memory grouses. 'I'm surprised you don't plan your escapes to ensure the lighting is _just_ right.'_) Spock simply watches him with polite inquiry, flawless in slate-gray tunic and trousers, framed by an angular mantle of darker indeterminate color. With his hands behind his back, he stands as though at parade rest, high boots ridiculously well-polished given the amount of dust on this space-rock. 

Standing bare-chested, hands briefly on his hips in defiance, Jim absorbs the appearance of his adversary and then leans forward in a highly dramatic, mockingly servile bow.  
"S'chn T'gai Spock," he says with a passable accent, as though they've just run across one another on some public promenade. "Fancy meeting you here!"

Spock says nothing, though the arc and height of one eyebrow speaks volumes for him. He is familiar with Jim's theatrics even if he rarely seems to understand them, and he is clearly in no mood to play along. 

Jim drops the act, all humor vanishing from his features as if it never were. "You're a real asshole, you know that?

"May I assume you have a compelling reason for this vulgar epithet, or have we merely reached the scatological portion of your diversionary tactics?" Stoic, seemingly stone-faced, there is still some something in Spock's eyes that seems almost… amused? Kirk hesitates to call it that, thinking instead of the Vulcan's direct and engaged gaze during their chess matches, which always seemed to imply what other races might call enjoyment.

"I was so close, Spock," Jim says, voice dangerously quiet. "The border's less than a stone's throw away, cosmologically speaking. You wouldn't have to worry about saving face-- one little delay would have given me the head-start I needed. What the hell does the Protectorate care if one unbalanced human heads off into Out-Space to get himself killed?"

Though they are standing at least twenty paces apart, he is a devoted student of Spock's particular tells-- he can see the momentary but powerful tightening of the warden's jaw. The other being takes a step forward-- just one-- and, while he refuses to budge, the human flexes the hand holding the rock to emphasize the fact he's armed. Poorly, but he has done a great deal of damage with far less, in his time. In the light of the dwindling afternoon, like the world awash in Saint Elmo's fire, Spock seems to be the only thing that is vibrant or real. Untouched by the false green illumination, he appears a being of elegant ink-brush lines, his colors as deep and rich as the dyes of stained glass. Inwardly, Jim sways just slightly, but he's pretty sure he's physically firm on his feet.

"The _Togolausu_ have located your associate, Citizen Vro, on Cyroam." The delivery is factual, but not as merciless as it could be. "Stonn lies in wait for you there."

_Fuck_. Carefully controlling his expression, Jim still flinches internally. That blows the whole plan to hell, and it puts Gaila in an extremely uncomfortable position. Rescued as a child from a derelict Orion slave ship, she's a citizen of the Protectorate on sufferance. He's just put a big black mark on a record she's managed-- despite her 'libidinous deviance' and lust for life-- to keep cleaner than his own. 

"I'm not afraid of Stonn," he replies cooly, as though five months of planning haven't just turned to ash. And, while he's speaking the truth, there's a little caveat in there. He _is_ aware of Stonn as a threat, since the joyless bastard is one of the small group of officials that consider sanctioning Jim to be a viable option-- and the most firm in his conviction. Kirk's disruptive opinions apparently amount to 'thought pollution'. 

"He also has agents monitoring Citizen Leighton on Planet Q." Now _that_ was actually said gently, but Jim is too pissed off to take conscious note. 

"The fuck you say!" he spits, a cold explosion. "Tommy had _nothing_ to do with this!"

Two more steps closer, though Jim is almost beyond caring. Right now, he'd be willing to take a swing at anyone, including Prime Minister T'Pau. He's just so damn _mad_. Tommy made it through Tarsus-- he shouldn't have to live the rest of his life with the liability of having simply having _known_ James T. Kirk.

"As the evidence will doubtless reveal," Spock's voice is definitely softer, and the acoustics of the canyon choose an odd time to make it sound as though he's speaking right next to Kirk's ear. "The _Togolausu_ are being overzealous under Stonn's direction, but the judiciary will not support it. Citizen leighton will not be penalized for crimes he has not committed, nor will Citizen Vro suffer for what is, essentially, a 'first offense'." The last might take some doing, though Jim doesn't doubt the influence of Spock's House is enough to pull it off. That makes the whole thing a favor or… some sort of concession.

Kirk's eyes narrow and, for the first time since they began their stand-off, looks away from Spock long enough to survey the rest of the canyon. While he hadn't been surprised that his sometime-nemesis chose to begin this confrontation alone, the continued absence of GOL agents (and his intel suggests Spock had at least five in his company when they landed on Pericolosa VII) is highly atypical. A breach of protocol, in fact.

"Where are your backup singers?" he asks, nonchalant to hide his embarrassment at not having noticed earlier.

(_"Damn it, Jim, when that hobgoblin is in the room its like you can't see anything else!"  
"Very funny, Bones. You know they'll only keep you here longer if you start having delusions. I can't wait to visit your fantasy kingdom."_)

"Two of my associates found the trail of your beast convincing enough that they considered their time better spent in its pursuit." There is a faint air of satisfaction about the Vulcan, who clearly didn't buy the false lead for a second. It could be almost smug, save that he also has an odd air of commiseration, as if he and Jim can enjoy the joke together. "The others have fanned out on the opposite end of the canyon system."  
Effectively trapping Jim between a bunch of bland but physically considerable opponents, and Spock. 

"That's three, right?" A fractional widening of those umber eyes-- it's so cute Spock didn't think Jim would get a read on his enemy's resources. "Come on, this system is huge," the human gestures widely to indicate the geological labyrinth around them. "They can't cover every exit with so little manpower. Sound them out for me and I can still get away." He's not wheedling _per se_, but he won't deny a bat or two of the eyelashes, for all the good it'll do. His voice is rougher than he'd like, close to betraying his exhaustion. He bites his tongue to the point of bleeding just so he can wet his throat. 

Closer, now-- or Jim's depth perception is deteriorating more rapidly than he thought. Spock says simply, "I cannot."

"G-ddamn you!" Kirk snarls, "No warden was ever a friend to his prisoner, and we all know Vulcans don't 'do' friendship anyway, but I thought…" He feels weary, and far more betrayed than he'd like to admit. He will not throw this rock right now no matter how satisfying it would be-- it'd look too much like a tantrum. "…I thought maybe we had an… understanding."

The minute tilt of that pale chin might be a nod of concession, but it is immediately contradicted by seemingly disinterested words. "Stonn does not have authorization from the Council to sanction you, nor will he get it. If he should be the one to apprehend you, however, I have significant concerns that an 'accident' might befall you while in his custody."

Jim snorts, "That sounds like him." Pitching his voice to a high and jeering quail, he adds, "Oh, no, the unstable human! Kill him before he breeds!" There's a thread of hysteria in there he did not intend. A part of him wants to let the exhaustion in, Atlas shrugging the world off his shoulders, and collapse on the rocky ground. At this point, a head injury might be an improvement.

"You will not be _breeding_ with anyone," Spock snaps, stride as forceful as his words. Way too close now, but Jim can't take a step backwards without a) falling down or, b) looking weak. Aside from choosing an odd point to fixate on, the Vulcan seems to have left his patient, condescendingly conciliatory civil servant personal back on Elba II. This will likely end up being the knock-down drag-out Kirk could almost taste the first time they faced off in the interrogation room, and he's just about to get in his adversary's face and _really_ let loose when he catches sight of the hands unfolding from behind that stiff back.

"Holy shit, Spock!" Jim almost yelps, well aware he sounds like some scandalized conservative. "Put your gloves back on!" It's an involuntary socialized reaction, one internalized long ago. He's seen Spock without gloves before

(_and boy, didn't the connotations of the old Earth saying 'caught bare handed' change and intensify once Vulcan began its patronage!_)

but those times have been rare, and always in a clinical context. Melding for psychiatric reasons is considered a last-ditch effort even for other Vulcans, but Jim has been disruptive enough to arose scientific curiosity. No less than four specially trained Vulcan Adepts have attempted to peer inside his head to diagnose just what makes it so impossible for him to accept the Protectorate's limits and integrate himself in a manner that would allow his intellect to benefit others. Until Spock, all had failed, maintaining contact for no more than seven seconds before withdrawing in hasty revulsion. One of these was _Kolinahru_, a fact Jim takes particular pride in; he's been known to brag that his brain is in fact a biological weapon.

Kirk very much doubts that three incidents between himself and the same Vulcan is enough to engender a Pavlovian response, but one fact is inescapable-- even the thought of those pale exposed hands, with their faint traceries of peridot veins at the articulations of the wrist, evokes a reaction. Something turns over within him, at the base of his spine and far too close to the banked forge of his sex, but more frightening for the softening of his heart's harsh edges that accompanies it. Even the first time-- shallow, but for a full five minutes-- he'd been rocked by the profundity of it, a reaction he was neither expecting nor accustomed to. Unruffled by Jim's sudden attack of prudishness, Spock waits impassively, almost within arm's reach. His eyes are dark, intent-- as though every detail of the human before him is a vital piece of a delicate and intricate puzzle. 

"I don't belong here," the fugitive says, steadied by a truth he's understood almost from the time he could toddle. "I'm suffocating-- all the junior races are, whether they know it or not. Everything is safe, predictable, controlled, and none of those are bad things until they stop being noteworthy. It's when they're taken for granted that the trouble can start. We're atrophying, Spock. If the Klingons invaded or all of Vulcan decided to take off for Andromeda, we-- humans, Andorians, Cardassians, what have you-- would go to pieces. With each passing decade, it becomes less and less likely we'll remember-- or even be able to relearn-- how to take care of ourselves."

"Vulcan is not going anywhere," its erstwhile half-son remarks, but it's no more than a passing observation. "You--"

Instinctively knowing that what might follow could be dangerous, Jim speaks before the magistrate can draw breath to do so again himself. "Fair enough," he shrugs tiredly. "I supposed one man doesn't have the right to ruin the bounty for everyone, even if he can see a storm on the horizon." He shakes his head, as angry with himself as he is with the situation. The last thing he wants is to be anything like Kodos. He fancies himself no god, no more qualified to chart the destiny of others than the next being. The defiance he has left is solely for himself, but it is no less passionate. He lets the hate-- that of a wild thing for the world of iron bars and leashes-- bleed into his voice. "I'm not going back to Elba II."

"Your initial escape exploited an unusual opportunity, but I am not so arrogant to suppose enough changes could be made to preclude another attempt. You are a creative opponent," Spock says with what, on anyone else, would be a sigh. The heavier words, the ones that might just hide an element of emotion in their ore, follow. "Your assertion is in error. You _do_ belong."

"_Liar_," Jim hisses, refraining from slapping the other man only because the rock is in his dominant hand. "Fuck, Spock, _what do you want from me_?!"

"This." With an alarmingly swift grace, Spock closes the distance between them. Utterly preoccupied with keeping his own hands, neck, and meld-points out of reach, Kirk is astonished to find himself seized by the upper arms with a grip that is somehow reverent despite its deep urgency. Dipping his head further, taking full advantage of his greater height, Spock clutches the human up against his strong frame and slants his mouth down against cracked lips in a kiss both punishing and unspeakably tender. Jim's mind reels-- it's as though his inner self has been swept up and enfolded in obsidian wings, want and adoration and desperate desire for unity wrapping deliquescent all around him. In the midst of this, the force of _Spock_ that suddenly composes the whole of existence, phantom flames lick up against the stubborn steel at the human's core, whispering a word more dangerous than any heated touch of lips. 

"_**Everything**_."

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [+] _Sashavau_\- (Vulcan) exposed, open, unprotected.  
[+] _Togolausu_\- (Vulcan) enforcer.  
[+] It's mentioned in TOS cannon that one of Kirk's ancestors was captain of a corsair in the 16th or 17th Century. I have a vague memory of the name 'Irish Pride' being mentioned in conjunction with this, but can't for the life of me recall what episode it would have been in. If I'm imagining things, ignore me. ;-)  
[+] Somewhat more obscure TOS cameos in order of appearance: Garth and Marta (Whom G-ds Destroy), Droxine (The Cloud-Minders), Jame Finney (Court Martial).  
[+] _kae'at k'lasa_\- (Vulcan) mind rape.  
[+] All Vulcan translations credited to the [VLD](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/).
> 
> The Management would once again like to apologize for the lack of porn. We welcome donations of kudos/comments to help remedy this truly sad situation. ^_~ Seriously, I would love to know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wherein Jim gets a surprise, Spock gets several surprises (some more pleasant than others), and… they roll around in the dirt for a while, 'cause that seems to be some sort of Starfleet SOP. ;-)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually had the majority of this written back in late September, as a kind of overflow from chapter one. Then my boss went on vacation, after which I had my annual review, directly after which my body filed a protest action and got sick. ^^' I finally no longer feel as though I'm living in a cough-syrup induced Iron Butterfly album cover, though, and-- more importantly-- the review went well. Thank you so, so much to everyone who responded so positively to the first part. It really helped me push through polishing this up!
> 
> **Trigger Warnings**: Depictions of Tarsus (no sexual component), brief mentions of disordered eating and suicidal ideation, brief 'telepathic' description of PTSD, slight dub-con inherent in spontaneous bonding.  
**Additional Warnings/Enticements**: Handsy Spock, Protective!Spock, vulnerable Jim, and some comfort to go with all that hurt.

**_Everything_**.

The word reverberates through Jim Kirk's entire being, as inescapable as it is physically soundless. A psychic caress, it is a thing of color braided with music, carrying with it a stamp as individual and unmistakable as the telepath's own finger-print. More so, perhaps, for all of his interactions with the Vulcan-- indeed, Spock's very _name_\-- seem for a moment to be only the outmost if dazzling layer of some more complex narrative beneath. Jim would know _Spock_ even if he was not 'Spock', would know this being's essence were it stored in a vessel of flesh, steel, or anything in between. The _animus_, the human is forced to label it, for 'soul' seems too quaint and civilized a word. This is raw, powerful, intimately earnest and unvarnished. 

Very far away, Kirk is aware that his amorous companion is mirroring their mental entanglement with a similar temporal one. The muscles of his own upper arms tense under a deceptively lithe inhuman grip; his body disobeys the last coherent orders his mind can summon and leans towards the taller being rather than away. The Vulcan's palms are dry-- no feckless wasting of water there-- but the human's skin is clammy and dusty with his travails, fine tremors spreading beneath it as his system continues to wrestle with those functions precluded by dehydration. The meld-points are a luxury and a totem, not a necessity; proof of that is all around him in the deft and coaxing manner with which the telepathic mind encompasses his own. However staggeringly powerful, he recognizes the roots of this union even in his memory of their very first meld. Upon that initial touching of minds, it had seemed to Jim that Spock's presence was the swelling of a desert storm which smelled faintly of rain and of a lightning held so tightly leashed that it would never come. He hadn't understood the response in himself then-- hadn't _needed_ to understand it to recognize that it was dangerous and so then brutally curb the impulse to reach out with the will for which he is so infamous. He'd wondered only briefly-- in the unlighted places of plausible deniability-- if it was the sort of frustration water and fragrant oil must feel, able to slide against and cradle one another while forever barred from mingling. 

The sense of rightness is so overwhelming, so obvious yet completely at odds with his own rationality that Kirk's thought processes finally halt with an almost shattering force. He has a brief, ludicrous memory of old Earth mythologies in which gods descended on mortals-- Danae in her shower of gold, Zephyrus attempting to snatch Hyacinthos away. The sensations sweeping over him are more than even a hedonist such as himself can parse or conceive of. All of this accompanied by a cautious avarice that would shame a dragon's handling of its most prized jewel. 

For all the kiss begins close-mouthed, Jim feels deliciously penetrated from the start. As the flood of exquisite mental input begins to moderate somewhat, he becomes aware of his own naked chest against the crisp lines of Spock's uniform, a source of arousal doubled exponentially by the power differential it implies. The magistrate's cloak brushes against them both-- he senses the Vulcan's desire to shelter him with it as much as he himself responds to the atavistic impulses that tie together clothing and scent. Kirk's balance, already precarious, crumbles in the face of dizzying want; the taller being shifts effortlessly to take the weight, consuming both the sound and vibration of Jim's uncharacteristically needy moan. Now a coaxing tongue does find the seam of lips, insinuating itself in paradoxically polite conquest. Almost feline in texture and dexterity, it is rough but decadently wet in the fugitive's mouth, lingering and encouraging a faint suckling, as if to share precious moisture. 

In this hushed and reverent chaos, this conflagration which rages but does not burn, Kirk can feel Spock's scrupulous restraint. His fingers stay, unyielding but not painful, always on Jim's upper arms, longing to roam _everywhere_

(_the gilded sable hair, the strong pectorals; the exotically rounded ears and the lush posterior hidden by tight, stretched material…  
by all the old and violent gods, such temptations cannot be countenanced! even the most devoted disciple of Logic could not stand unbowed in the face of _this_._)

but knowing that a shift in grip or sudden movement could remind his _tal-kam_ of the implied threat posed by the Vulcan's unclad hands. All of this pales in comparison to the _mind_ Spock covets, the entrancing and ever-shifting architecture that beckons the telepath even at this moment. Because he understands the material far better than the metaphysical, Jim chooses to take umbrage at the insultingly delicate handling he is receiving, as well as the constant reminder of their comparative physical strength. The concept of his own mind as a source of enticing sensuality is too profound to bear consideration; the body, a passing thing hurtling always towards its own end, at least puts an expiration date on desire. More importantly, he is not some skittish animal to be _gentled_ and if, when he drops the rock almost directly on Spock's left boot, his fingers are also somewhat benumbed with pleasure-- well, good luck getting him to admit it.  
Of course Spock, the bastard, doesn't even seem to notice the impact.

With his hands free and temporarily ungoverned by his conscious mind 

(_if they were, he would attempt to wring that graceful neck, no matter the futility, just to make a point-- on the star that is his father's grave, he _would__)

Kirk cards his own digits through the dark and orderly strands of Spock's hair, a symbol of the magistrate's outward dedication to convention. The desire to _muss_ that perfection, to see the other being flushed and unable to hide answering cataclysmic forces, has possessed the human ever since they first met in person. A strange reaction, given the ubiquity of Vulcans and their sumptuary uniformity. Like everyone else in the galaxy, he has always pretty much accepted the ruling species just as they present themselves-- immovable regulators possessed of only the most obscure motivations, sexless dolls sculpted by a talented if repetitive hand. As remote, otherworldly, and beyond fleshly considerations as the icons of old Earth saints. Spock is different

(_damn him, why must he always be different; real, visceral, _special_…_)

and there's a satisfaction in being allowed this tactile access that almost makes up for their inequality in dress. Like beautiful proportions in marble, roped off for centuries in museums, vulnerable to a touch that never comes. The blue-black strands of Spock's hair have a strange, pleasant texture for which silk is a poor comparison, and Jim's explorations are well received if the irrepressible shiver that permeates his partner is any indication. There's a growl as well, escaping as both vibration and a brief huff of breath distinctly warmer than the human's. The shattering sensuality of the encounter is overwhelming, but that isn't what finally inspires the sharp dart of panic deep in a mind which-- while thoroughly human-- has its own ways of cataloguing and repressing such things. By now, Kirk has an almost animalistic instinct for self-preservation. Fear, while useful as a warning, must promptly dissolve under purposeful action, or it will destroy the very being it was evolved to protect. Nothing in his life has ever inspired quite the type of terror as he feels in that pin-prick of a moment and, caught up in one another as they are, Spock is deceived by Jim's very lack of mental finesse. Even the touching of their minds, so much more complete than any previous meld, is not what alerts Jim to the danger. It is the sense of succor and comfort, so profound that the dirty and emaciated boy-child still buried alive beneath the man knows it cannot be trusted. The Vulcan's adoration, the kinship he exudes, is like an ocean of molten copper; the sole purpose of its liquid embrace is to draw Jim down, cosseting and worshiping until breath

(_freedom_) 

becomes unnecessary and forgotten. An unimportant rumor. 

Kirk's grasp of objective time has already been shot to hell, which is-- at least to his mind-- sufficient explanation for the length of their intimate skirmish. Never the less, he pulls back from the kiss with strategic care, aware of their shared breathing and the eclipse-darkness of the Vulcan's lust-blown pupils. He drags his fingers sensually down over Spock's strong neck and shoulders, the delicate touch earning another tremor and thus the opportunity to step back. Only once the telepath's dangerous hands fall away, trembling slightly in their astonishment, does Jim allow the complete fulminating force of his intention to sear through his conscious mind, as lava may build up and burst beneath a quiet sea. He is nothing but chaos and turbulent emotion, but he is far more accustomed to this state than his foe.  
Pulling back just a little bit further, Jim raises his now-empty fist and clocks Spock clean across the jaw. 

Inevitably, they both go sprawling; uneven weight distribution takes care of that. Kirk has just enough presence of mind to shift footing, ensuring that he at least pitches backwards rather than falling atop the Vulcan. He'd do well to avoid physical contact right now, to say nothing of compromising positions and/or friction. Even as he lands on his ass and elbows (the sting of scraped skin flaring briefly, only to be lost amidst his body's other complaints), a part of him wants to laugh. Raucous, inappropriate bellowing to mock himself and the situation. Never in a million years, armed with a million databanks, could he have postulated this scenario. It seems, for once, as though Spock is the one relying on _blitzkrieg_ moves to shift the board in his favor.

"What," Jim gasps, even as he wastes no time scrabbling backwards, "the _hell_ was that?" If his voice sounds a little too high-pitched, on the wrong side of panicky, he's not going to worry about it. He's flat on his ass in the dust, arms and legs akimbo, half-hard in trousers that leave nothing to the imagination. Dignity is a dream.

"Intimate contact between the _labia oris_ of two individuals has an astonishingly common interpretation throughout the galaxy, even if it is not native to my own culture," Spock observes, having not even the decency to sound out of breath.

"Well, shit, Spock." Now is the time to deploy a grin of practiced lechery, if ever there was one. In the past, occasionally targeting Spock with outrageous flirtation has always made the warden extremely-- if not obviously-- uncomfortable. Not inarticulate by any means, or really even outwardly perturbed, but at least stiffer in posture and less loquacious than usual. "You know my past. Whatever happened to the logic of direct speech? You didn't need to chase me to the middle of Bum-Fuck, Nowhere. I'd have blown you in your office on Elba II if you'd just asked nicely."

Ah, but there's not even a flicker of discomfiture now, just an increased gravitas and the strengthening of poise which-- as perhaps only Jim understands-- serves as a stand-in for a frown. "You are being willfully vulgar and obtuse." As the Vulcan stands, Jim takes advantage of the slight decrease in scrutiny to move himself into a crouching position. It's more effective if he needs to leap aside and, given the vertiginous haze lapping at his brain, he's not sure he can maintain upright balance just now in any case. "You know very well that Vulcans do not engage in casual intimate displays of any kind, particularly not those which imply… physical ardor. Profligate mental contact is equally distasteful." Then, accompanied by a glance of piercing determination, clearly meant to discourage deliberate misunderstanding, "My people mate for life."

Even if it's the answer Kirk was (rather fearfully) anticipating, it doesn't make it any more palatable. By all forsaken gods in all their infernal pits! The self-appointed guardians of civilization might be extremely close-mouthed about their own culture-- though they are thoroughly cognizant of everyone else's-- but even centuries of obfuscation cannot hide the essential truth behind their mating. It is universally acknowledged that, should you find yourself standing between a Vulcan and their bonded, you need to get the _hell_ out of the way.

(_'You ought to be more discerning about batting those pretty eyelashes of yours at just anyone, Jim. One of these days, you're gonna bite off more than you can chew.'_)

"Are you out of your god-damned mind!?!" Jim shouts, doing a far better impromptu impression of Bones than he would have been capable of deliberately.

"Negative. I am physically sound and adequately mentally centered to qualify as legally competent." Spock seems inappropriately tall, standing now at the approximate distance from which they began, his shadow seeming to the human like palpable velvet where it falls across his own form. "Regret is illogical, as it remedies nothing. Yet, I find the cause in this instance sufficient to acknowledge and offer such sentiment." Those eyes, those strange dark mirrors which have always betrayed to Kirk the most unbelievable reflections, seem to soften. "Jim, I regret having struggled so long with my own preconceived notions and perceptions. I did not correctly assess the obvious evidence as efficiently as logic and proper self-awareness would dictate. Had I not been so consumed with my own uncertainties, I would have declared my intentions long before you had the opportunity to escape Elba II, and our bond would not have been tested in this manner."

"Fucker of _le-matyas_! Oasis-defiler!" Kirk shouts, his anger having outstripped the insults of his own native tongue. While the galactic benefactors may not encourage proliferation of their own language amidst their charges, this has not prevented certain cultural concepts from bleeding over into Standard. There's a great deal of information packed into Spock's little soliloquy and even more therein implied, but all the fugitive can feel in the moment is white-hot rage. It burns through him, reaching extremes which force it parabolically back to scathing cold, so that his voice is positively arctic when when he orders, "Get out of my head!"

The dreams, previously closed to his conscious mind like blossoms against the inhospitable night, now reveal themselves fully, forced out by realization and ready to crumble to ashes at the slightest touch. Yes, Spock had haunted his thoughts, making his sleep fitful and uneasy when he had the luxury to rest at all-- that much has been clear since he began his flight from Elba II. Now, as hindsight peels back the protective layer of ignorance, an all-pervading sense of _presence_ filters back into those fractured memories of somnolence. Not merely the warm shadow dogging his footsteps, but something much more specific; touchings and strokings, syllables of exotic praise and beckoning solace breathed against his dream-self's flesh. He was _wanted_, the phantom supplicant had wordlessly informed him, a powerful inchoate essence which longed only to enfold. It offered respite, satiation and-- because much of Kirk's core was still a spavined half-wild boy-- the honeyed promises, no matter how sincere, were automatically suspect. Like a touch through thick wool, the contact between Jim and this Other had been muted. The human had absorbed it whilst restraining himself from acting in return, an enterprise so exhausting it depleted half of what he gained. He was not above taking what he needed to sustain himself but, like any savage beast, he never got close enough to risk being leashed. 

Jim's enemy is Vulcan-- yet, no matter how abundantly obvious their positions, he had still somehow let the humanity in Spock's heritage obscure the raw implications of that fact. A tactical error, and a damning one. _Of course_ the mental seduction began long before any physical overtures, in ways Kirk had been foolish enough to interpret as idle curiosity and a competitor's desire for insight into a combatant of equal prowess. He had perceived Spock's motives in light of his own elation-- however grudging and resentful-- at finding a another strategist who could truly challenge _him_, could force the Imperious Tiberius to lean in and sweat for victory. A little convivial rivalry to get the blood pumping, and the only thing to counteract the mind-numbing boredom of hospital routine. If he's honest (and he has no care to be at this point, the fight has simply gotten too dirty), he's perhaps more angry with himself for walking into the trap than with Spock for springing it.  
Kirk steels himself, grinding his unkempt nails into the skin of his temples, gratified after a moment by the trickle of sweat-diluted blood.

"Out, out, _out_!" he repeats, shouts so raw the words become almost unintelligible. "GET OUT!"

"Stop this!" the order is vehement but spoken quietly, with all the circumspection of a guardian addressing a hysterical child. Accompanying this is a thin trickle of despair and self-recrimination that very obviously do not belong to Jim. If it were any other emotion, if there had been even a trace of defensiveness, self-righteousness, or combativeness in the magistrate's tone or emanations, the approach-- however simple and disarming-- would never have worked. 

Even so, the only outward sign of Kirk's temporarily leashed ire lies in the slow lowering of his hands, fingers pausing in their mangling of the skin at his temples and the sides of his face. The bright crescent slices of pain provide focus, pushing away the clamor of his body's myriad other ailments. Moreover, it has clearly shocked Spock's sensibilities in a way Jim's burlesque flirting could not achieve. The Vulcan physio-cultural emphasis on both the hands and the _qui'lari_ region have transformed the Kirk's seemingly petty self-injury; if he had suddenly begun to gouge the area around his genitals, the human might have offended Spock's sense of decency more-- but not by much. For just a moment, a slight and unquantifiable change passes over the Vulcan's expression that serves as an indication of compassion and concern. Jim cannot for one moment articulate this subtle shift-- it's like trying to describe infinitesimal fluctuations in gradations of color or sunlight. As undeniable as it is indefinable. It is masked quickly, betrayed then only by the tight coiling of Spock's form. His pursuer is carefully avoiding any solicitude, the human knows, because it would only stir his own temper once more.  
It rankles to be known so well.

"Jim," the tone of address is now more suited to some academic context-- observational, distantly polite. "No less than four _Kash-nohv_ adepts have attempted to meld with you in the past, and each one found themselves violently ejected in turn. You may be psi-null from a traditional standpoint, but you mind is irrefutably dynamic, and your strength of personality inviolate. Only I have been able to both achieve and maintain contact with your psyche." And here, some dark satisfaction smolders in those ebon eyes. "We are both therefore faced with the undeniable: however initially inadvertent, no connection this deep could have formed against our combined wills."

"_There's_ a hoary old chestnut," Kirk sneers. In the soft, blurred manner of ancient and overly-theatrical Terran actresses, he continues, "No, no-- oh, yes, yes! Take me like a runaway train!" It's obvious Spock doesn't quite get the reference, but the derision in the words is plain enough. Then, reverting just as quickly to the cold and deadly tactician, Jim adds, "Very convenient. Blame the victim." 

"There are no victims here," Spock replies evenly, lifting an eyebrow in what may be sardonic recognition of the human's point, "Or, we are victims of each other. Only the greatest affinity can inspire a link such as ours-- it is an instinctual matter, beyond our conscious control."

If it's possible to shiver with an internal flare of warmth, Kirk does just that. He so dislikes like the way the Vulcan's assertions resonate within him, but he cannot escape the enthralling little tremors they inspire. That unobtrusive sense of companionship has been present from the very moment Spock first touched his meld-points; a sort of sweet, pervasive natural sympathy that has always been breath-taking in its power and simplicity. Coming away from that initial venture, a shallow procedure thankfully undertaken in the relative privacy of the magistrate's office, Jim had been surprised to find only five minutes of objective time had passed. To his inexpressible relief, the odd lingering impression-- very much rooted in his own mind but clearly ignored or not registered by the telepath-- of physical closeness had been just that: some ephemeral misfiring of his essentially blind psyche. Coming back to himself, Kirk's spatiotemporal perceptions had insisted he and the Vulcan were standing so close as to almost qualify as an embrace, the human's forehead resting lightly against Spock's pale, well-formed clavicle. However conventional their actual positions-- properly seated, facing one another, with only the telepath's fingers as a point of physical contact-- would have appeared to an outsider, however prosaic he assumed the whole thing had been for Spock, the meld had been _good_. Satisfying in a bone-deep way far more obscure than sex (which would have kicked Jim into panic mode instantly) and more tempting than any drink or drug with which he had ever attempted to numb himself.  
Yet, in spite of everything he knows about Vulcans, in defiance of every finely attenuated survival instinct he's developed, he'd let Spock do it _twice_ more. However critical the mistake, however galling he finds it as a tactician, he swears internally that it will not force him into submission. He will not yield ground paid for in anything less than blood. 

"I want my rock back," Jim says with sullen viciousness, not at all interested in what union his mind might or might not have reached for-- consciously or otherwise. Forget making Spock writhe on the hook with him, at this point he's just playing for time. A few more seconds for his mind to locate a new angle; a few more moments in which his perception of himself as an isolated and ultimately solipsistic being may stand. The large hunk of shale with which he had armed himself and then so foolishly let slip in his astonishment (he will maintain to the end that's all it was), lies closer to Spock than it does to his own hand, though it is no longer in easy reach for either of them. For a moment, Jim considers making use of the other, smaller stones sparsely littering the floor of the canyon, but even the best specimens cannot outsize a child's fist. Taking potshots at his improbable suitor is unlikely to accomplish anything, especially given his own deteriorating proprioception and hand-eye coordination. He'd love to pound some sense into that thick Vulcan skull, but now doesn't appear to be the best opportunity. 

Instead of fear, the alarmingly ferocious grin Kirk showcases at these thoughts only seems to inspire an answering sort of affection in Spock. Eyebrow aloft, the taller being says quietly, "In ancient times, those bound such as we often discovered and consummated their union on the battlefield. For now, such violence is unnecessary."

"Violence is all I know," Jim retorts, with far more honesty than he intended. 

"Untrue," his pursuer replies, unperturbed. "You do yourself disservice. A being who is a mere brute, compelled to attack and destroy, would not be capable of your intellectual achievements. Your programming and tactical skills outstrip those of many Vulcans; you have the sole, dubious distinction of being the only individual to ever compromise the VSA's network. Having done so, you did not stoop to wanton vandalism or wreck the havoc your access would have allowed."

"That's an awfully charitable assessment from someone who spent years picking away at my backstops, all because some human had the temerity to fuck with your simulations. Then you crossed, what, 15.9 million parsecs just to arrest me? The first time, I mean."

Spock straightens his posture with a certain ruffled dignity. "I will concede that the purpose of your cyber-assault on the VSA initially escaped me, Jim," he says, voice unaccountably tender over the the single syllable name of what, to him, is an alien tongue. "You wished to illustrate that adherence to absolute delineations of 'success' and 'failure' can blind one to possible partial solutions, thus avoiding what your people call 'a total loss'. You said when confronted that you do not believe in no-win scenarios. I am attempting to employ your methodology now by offering you a third option. Even if you are taken into custody and returned to Elba II, circumstances will not be as they were. It is known that I am… extremely compromised in any matter regarding yourself."

For the first time, it occurs to Kirk that Spock may have received censure for the escape which-- while in truth due mostly to Jim's opportunistic exploitation of a junior staffer's lapse-- technically took place under his administration. It shouldn't bother him, especially when the whole _point_ of Elba II was to dress up denial of personal liberty as some sort of socially-conscious treatment center. 

Whatever happened, Spock doesn't seem to resent the human escapee, for the clear trace of concern lies only in the words that follow: "You have made an enemy of Stonn-- both as an individual and by virtue of our bond. Your health…" For a moment, he looks quietly despairing, spreading his naked palms as if to encompass the entire situation. "You would not survive long outside the Protectorate, even if you were able to reach _Sashavau_ without Citizen Vro's assistance. Returning with me, acknowledging that we are _telsu_, will afford certain legal protections. For _both_ of us," he emphasizes, before Jim can question such largesse. "I am aware you require evidence of self-interest on my part to shift your opinion on the verity of my claim." A deep, irregular breath, "It will allow me to protect _you_." 

"By marrying me!?" Jim scoffs, because the only other option is to rage once more, insulted by the notion that he has ever needed anyone to look after him. His incredulity is unvarnished, needing no additional theatricality to convey its strength. Nothing that has ever passed between them, be it via meld or that statistical anomaly of a kiss, can mitigate the preposterousness of the situation. Which is actually helpful, given the deep and abiding knowledge weaving itself about his spine, careless of all intellectual denial. It trickles over the intuition he has so often relied upon, at last coiling sweetly at the base of his skull, in that area the Egyptians once called 'the seat of the soul'. 

"The human concept of marriage pales in comparison to the intimacy of bondmates," Spock informs him. Not with the usual faint loftiness, but with a rich and bottomless promise that stirs grudging embers in Jim's heart and groin. To say nothing of the blaring alarm bells now sounding their cacophony in his already aching head. 

"I'm going to break the habit of a lifetime and point out the logical flaws in your argument," Kirk says, always more prone to breaking things in practice than in theory. It seemed to get the point across better, by and large. "Do you really expect me to believe that the High Council would for one moment consider a bond between _any_ Vulcan and a notorious malcontent, never mind the heir to House of Surak and…" he waves his hand over his own still crouching form, as if to indicate the slurs, insults, and patent falsehoods that have been flung at him all his life. If Spock wants to bring self-interest into the equation, he should worry less about Jim's evaluation and more about how his own people would view such a match. Any concern in the human's voice exists solely to drive that point home; "This could _destroy_ you, Spock. A misalliance like this could cost you your VSA contracts, your research connections, your position--"

"The termination of my tenure as magistrate of Elba II is all but finalized." That the words are devoid of inflection does not disguise humiliation Spock's superiors likely intended, nor does it soothe the little spikes of guilt-- however irrational-- in Kirk's stomach. "However, my somewhat… irregular position with the VSA is undamaged," the Vulcan continues, as though his previous statement presents a mere occupational inconvenience instead of a significant career set-back. "I have not been formally chastised by the House Matriarch, and the Council itself authorized some of the resources with which I have presently located you. The order for your detainment has been amended to specify that you are a ward of my Clan, to be accorded all the rights thereof. Few would dare to touch you, though I am not confident this is enough to discourage Stonn from contriving some situation in which he may circumvent or pretend ignorance of these stipulations. It is best you avoid contact with him until matters are more firmly settled."

Jim can't help but snort at that last bit, though its probably the first sensible thing Spock has said since since they started this surreal stand-off. Stonn would do well to avoid Kirk in turn, especially if he's started causing trouble for the few people Jim considers friends. 

"I acknowledge and accept the consequences of our _tel_," the apparently former magistrate continues, somehow mingling the absolute dignity of his first statement with the all-consuming reverence of what follows. "_You_ are worth it, Jim. You are beyond price."

Kirk opens his mouth, uncertain if his retort will address the theory that his frequent chess partner seems to have become completely unhinged, or focus on the fact that about seven districts on Risa alone know _exactly_ what Jim's price is.

Spock doesn't give him a chance to speak. "Furthermore, the implication in your use of future-intentional verbs relating to our union is in error." The satisfaction is almost palpable now. "No further action is required to seal our bond-- it is already done."

A part of Jim Kirk wants to scream at this-- to howl in denial and rush this tender tormentor with a fury as unbalanced as his own steps would be-- but, in the end, it would be a concession. No matter how many successful blows he might land or the sheer defiance he might showcase, Spock would ultimately be the one gratified. A denial as strong as the one trapped in his throat might as well be a tacit admission, for no one so violently and categorically rejects something they don't already fear-- already _know_\-- to be true. Kirk has his pride, difficult though it may be for others to recognize it at times. Oh, not the pretense of vanity, the peacocking he does just as much to mock his audience as to amuse himself; those are only distracting baubles. His definition of dignity is warped as the most determined tree, which grows in distorted shapes that it might reach the sunlight by any and all means possible. He has made displays of himself which would convince his own mother he has no shame; he has scrabbled in the dirt and survived on things even carrion-eaters won't touch; others have fondled and abused his body without ever getting _close_ to the being that inhabits it. Yet Spock, without any of these degradations or predatory manipulations, has somehow found his way into the interior chambers of Kirk's being-- not as a trespasser, which would have at least offered the opportunity for resentment, but as a weary traveler accepted whole-heartedly by the human's subconscious. _That's_ what kills him, what prevents him from protesting like the giant Goliath in a fit of absolute pique. The Tellarites, easily the most contrary race in the galaxy, have the right of it, inscribing on the lintel of every legal building an single invaluable piece of advice. _'Speak not these words most foul: the Truth'_. 

Jim recognizes now that he failed to seize his one and only opportunity to reject Spock, which would have lain in never allowing a meld to begin with. The other minds that had attempted to contact his own were all alien-- not just in a biological sense, but in their fundamental hypostasis. Like a dormant virus in the emotional immune system, Spock had possessed enough kinship with the human to pass undetected, to achieve the impossible and slip in through the backdoor. Given the number of times he's perpetrated a similar hacking strategy, it's somewhat ironic that Kirk only now understands how unpalatable it is to be on the other end. 

"Then _undo_ it," he grits out, though at this point its all for show.

"And when your own psyche rebels, anchoring the bond further in protest? When you reject the melding Healer with the same ferocity as all the others?" While the question is quiet, it thrusts right into the heart of the matter with all Spock's typical unbiased factuality. It would be so much easier if he would just be mercilessly truthful like others of his kind, in the most basic sense of the term: without mercy, without vendetta, without any concern at all for bald recitation of reality. For all his evident lack of investment-- and Spock imitates his 'betters' _very_ well-- there is something shifting far beneath the initial presentation. The secret life of a delicate and self-contained ecosystem hidden within some seemingly sterile moon. That doesn't mean Kirk isn't ready to parry and thrust back, to hurt the other being as much as he himself is hurting, but this particular Vulcan insists on surprising him again. "I cannot deny that my mind would also fight any attempt at severance. Even in the vanishingly unlikely possibility that the bond could somehow be broken, I do not believe I would last long should we be irrevocably sundered."

Fuck Jim if Spock hasn't finally learned how to pull off a _desperado_ decoy. How many times has he outfoxed his classicist chess opponent by making plays that are needlessly risky or place his pieces in vulnerable positions, only to watch the shadow of the not-line between those upswept brows deepen in consternation? It's a damned inconvenient time for the scholar to start picking up Kirk's bad habits. 

The fugitive climbs to his feet, mostly because he doesn't want to sit there gaping on his haunches. His balance actually holds up-- feet planted wide, he puts his hands on his hips in the gesture of defiance and wonders who he hates more: Spock for choosing _this_ moment to be vulnerable, or himself for the vituperation he's about to unleash on a defenseless if entirely metaphorical heart. 

(_i don't wanna hurt you, damn you don't make me, damn you and damn us both that it matters… _)

In all likelihood, Kirk could have let loose with his venomous tongue and kept the verbal standoff going until-- as McCoy put it-- both he and Spock were 'blue in the face'. He never gets a chance, for both human and Vulcan each make a mistake in quick succession. The rebel takes his steadiness for granted, rolling his eyes at what-- from the cultural standpoint of Tu'Surak, at any rate-- is a rather tender confession, and promptly finds himself overwhelmed by dizziness. He takes two steps forward, the probability of righting himself still within reach, when Spock commits his own error and moves to offer support. 

They end up rolling-- fighting-- in the dirt, of course. The scuffle is genuine enough, though later Kirk will be unconvinced that the struggle does him any real credit. As Jim goes down, all hope of new footing gone because he'll be damned if he lets the Vulcan come to his rescue, the only truly coherent image in his mind is that of the red flag waved before a bull. Everyone knows it doesn't really matter what color the blasted flag is, its the motion that riles the animal-- and this is exactly the sort of nonsense one considers during the interminable seconds of an endless fall. Red anger, red human blood, and then an anticipation of the sickly carnival-yellow pain. 

The unwholesome crack and stark white of broken bone never materialize, however, truncating the all-too-familiar parade. Instead, there's only a thud and an involuntary expulsion of air as he lands on top of Spock (and G-d only knows what unholy trick of _Suus Mahna_ allowed the bastard to pull that off). Before Kirk can even push himself up, the Vulcan rolls them over, reversing their positions. Stronger, heavier, the other being pins Jim with more care than the delinquent likely deserves-- especially since Kirk uses the weight on his captured wrists to leverage his lower body upward. The contact between their burning sexes is incidental, he tells himself, as is the alternate interpretation of the leg he hooks about that trim waist. For a moment, he fears the Vulcan's heavy mantle will get in the way, but he brings the back of his heel down on Spock's lower torso with all the force he can muster, two inches to the left of the spine and just above the pelvic ridge-- right on the _chenesi_. The Vulcan smothers but cannot hide the pained groan unique to males assaulted in a particular portion of the anatomy, and Jim takes a dark satisfaction in it even as he rolls over and away. Scrambling on hands and knees, scraping skin that no longer truly registers the abuse, he gains perhaps three feet of distance before his pursuer grabs hold of him once more. Lunging swiftly, albeit more gingerly than usual, his opponent fastens a long-fingered hand first about the offending ankle, then about the midsection as the human attempts to rise. They go down again when Spock counteracts the momentum of Kirk's flight with the weight of his own solid form; back in the dirt, with the Vulcan on his ass and Jim practically in his lap. They sit there together in their dishevelment, harsh breaths and heaving chests disturbingly in sync, while Spock crosses a leg over the prone ones of his captive to ward off any further untoward and mule-like kicking.

The pounding of his heart and their combined gasps for air sound to Jim almost like another dust storm on the rise, but the sense of buffeting disorientation retreats almost immediately. It is as though they occupy together the scant meters of peace one finds in the eye of a whirlwind, with a wall of chaos between their unexpected sanctuary and the rest of the world. Gradually, he realizes Spock is almost rocking them together in an infinitesimal, nonsexual attempt to soothe that Kirk would really rather put down to his own vertigo. It comes to him, in another one of those moments which double over to mirror the past, that he used to hold Kevin in just this way, restraining the toddler until he finally learned that the sound of adult footsteps did not automatically mean food or rescue. Once the boy-- and Jim, peering between wooden slats, tearfully mute and terrified-- had seen one of Kudos' plainclothes followers shoot Trudy in the back, he definitely absorbed the object lesson. When beating the ruined village for remaining 'undesirables' failed, the unchallenged dictator sent less threatening survivors to coax out the unwary, even dressing some of them in Protectorate MediCorps uniforms taken from the dead. Trudy hadn't fallen for it, but she hadn't been able to find cover quickly enough either. She fell down and Kevin finally figured out that, in this game, 'playing dead' afforded no do-overs or take-backs. 

Unlike those days of privation, there is no firm palm across the held one's mouth to stifle protest. Jim howls like a wild cat, though even that ruckus is unable to break the hushed but turbulent reverence gathered around them. He tries and fails in one more burst of desperation to somehow defy the inhuman hold, falling then into a silence as just mutinous as his protests had been. Spock's patience is that of gravity, of planets which slowly lure in and capture new moons. Never once is his grip truly painful, only implacable, grounding, and utterly sure. His arms are flush with those of his quarry, crossed with Jim's over the human's chest. Bare Vulcan palms hold Kirk in place at the shoulders, keeping a careful distance from the shorter being's mouth. Wise enough-- Jim is definitely in a biting mood-- but, as the last of his strength vanishes like so much morning mist, the human becomes aware of something else. Those same hands, in defiance of alien body temperature, feel somehow simultaneously as cool as they do heated, inspiring the same paradoxical repletion and invigoration caused by the caress of air after a warm bath. 

Kirk goes completely limp, body soaking up the feel of Spock against him without his conscious permission. The embrace-- though still firm, the pretense of restraint is now rather dubious-- inspires a riotous esurience the kiss did not. However passionate and addictive that meeting of lips may have been, it was not as blatantly dangerous as this purposefully tender hold. Touches like these have always dismayed Jim; physicality for the sake of companionship and affirmation rather than any obvious sexual goal. It feels good, far too good, to let Spock cradle him this way. Like lying back in the ocean, knowing the waves will hold you in their respite. He lets his head drop back on his captor's shoulder, eyes closing against the exhaustion that can so easily find him here, at once enfolded and exposed.

"Jim," Spock says, now just beside his ear, more a stirring of breath than anything else. The voice is still carefully controlled, betrayed only by a light brush-- repeated twice, no accident-- of the Vulcan's nose against the short, sweat-moistened hairs at the back of Kirk's neck. What gives the present victor away is not a shudder of pleasure or a clear savoring of scent, but rather the returning stiffness that always marks Spock's reinforced self-mastery. Jim is both unsurprised and nonplussed to find this ruthless discipline does not fully extend to the emotive energy flowing between them. The insight of touch-telepathy transmogrifies the Vulcan's unvarying factual delivery, as an expert eye may discern original text washed away and then overwritten in some Medieval tome. "My _kwai-ashayam_, you have made your protests known-- all else is nimiety, and does not alter our circumstances." Like the imperceptible rocking, this is not condescension but commiseration-- empathy from someone equally dwarfed by the ineluctable.

"Come with me, then." While Jim cannot deny that the words are his own, it still feels as though they have been ripped from him in wanton viciousness. Some scythe, hooked amidst his innards, cutting him open to reveal sentiments he would otherwise deny. He has _missed_ Spock in the six months he's been on the run (a fact he blames entirely on the other being) and can no longer persist in willful ignorance of that loneliness. Not with the dreams outlined so starkly, reliquaries emptied to find the contents more potent and otherworldly than the imagination allowed. Not sitting in this embrace, relaxing further in reluctant forfeiture, the perfect tip of one ear just visible as he stares up at the delirious and unhelpful sky. He has the powerful sense memory of the relief and gratitude that welled in his chest as he'd felt the stock freighter move into warp, putting the seal on his escape from Elba II. How much of that, he wonders suddenly and with all the trepidation of discovering a secret chamber within the self, had its root in the impulsivity of the whole endeavor? Stowed away behind a panel so dangerously close to the outer bulkhead that no one thought to equip it with security sensors, it had been easy to push away the pangs in his heart; to blame them on guilt at leaving his friends and fellow-inmates behind. Yet he'd known even then that they-- Bones, Scotty, even Chekov-- were not in a position to gamble as recklessly as he himself did, and that his idle contemplations of security and staff routine had inspired little enthusiasm in his potential coconspirators. How much harder would it have been to leave the clinic

(_to leave **Spock**?_)

if he'd had time to think it through?

He is brazen enough to admit-- in the privacy of his own mind, dubious though that notion has become-- that the struggle would not have been unlike the one he presently senses in the being holding him. Kirk finds himself briefly functioning as an anchor, though he can no more imagine Spock adrift than he can imagine the environs beyond the event horizon of a black hole-- a truly alien concept. If he anticipated any reaction to his invitation, it would have been a fissure of shock through their connection. Though he has never thought about it directly, Jim's overall understanding of 'life, the universe, and everything' dictates the assumption that Spock should reject the option out of hand, having never (out of entirely logical selfishness) been remotely capable of conceiving the scheme on his own. Instead, Kirk is aware not only of the Vulcan's internal conflict, but an almost eclipsing sense of overwhelming exhalation 

(_t'hy'la, my katra's twin… that I have lodged in you, an inescapable thorn, just as you have buried your sweet sting in me… that you should wish to take me with you_  
\--**parted from me and never parted**\--  
_and give voice to such… a concession, a prize beyond the most optimistic contemplation!_)

that seems to communicate itself almost like the burst of a star in Kirk's solar plexus. Auditory silence falls over the canyon, extending for so long-- almost a full minute, an interminable amount of time for a being of Spock's cognitive prowess-- that the human very nearly lets himself hope. 

(_'and hope,' says the grave-rotted voice of a monster, the king of monsters who can no more be slain than a nightmare can be bottled up and shoved in a drawer; who can be heard even in the shelter of Spock's arms because all good things must be paid for, with interest, 'hope clouds observation'._)

Jim learned many lessons on Tarsus, so well that their prosaic reinforcement now in later life barely registers. The moment Spock draws breath to speak, he knows he's going to be disappointed, so he quashes the emotion as a jackboot might step on a frail, malnourished wrist.

"_Jim_." If Vulcans are not known for their subtlety, why is it _this_ one can say Kirk's name with so many varied meanings? On Elba II, the telepath almost invariably called him 'Citizen Kirk', correct and impersonal. Which makes the sound of his first name-- and the diminutive version, at that-- seem almost as illicit as those bare hands. An incantation. "There would be no disguising myself in _Sashavau_. I cannot pass for Romulan, and the mere rumor of my presence would encourage capture for ransom by professionals and opportunists alike. I would be a liability, one even greater than your dangerously wanting sense of self-preservation." There's a sliver of humor in there, slight though it may be, and Kirk can't decide if he should be amused or irritated that Spock is attempting to soften the blow. "Moreover, collaboration between us is not as unexpected as you might posit. Given the number of false leads you generated even before reaching Pericolosa VII, does it not strike you that a force of five accompanying _Togolausu_ for myself alone is somewhat excessive for what must be one of many concurrent operations?"

_That_ brings Kirk up short, however temporarily. Like all members of psi-null species, he cannot quite escape the assumption that some level of deception must be achievable in mental rapport, just as it is in verbal communication. To sense trepidation, temptation, and fidelity in Spock at his suggestion is one thing; to know that others have objectively recognized the same enough to act on it adds a level of certitude he's far from comfortable with. 

Whatever the Vulcan might sense from Jim in return, Spock merely continues to lay out his reasoning, rote and just shy of pedantic. "The Council is well aware that my loyalties have been compromised-- a fact that does not impugn my honor only by virtue of its context. The conflict is unfortunate, but the realignment itself is only natural: you, _t'nash-veh telsu_, are my priority."

"Coulda fooled me," the human sneers past a lump in his throat, which is hardly surprising giving how desperately dry it is. "So, what? You've spent your entire life trying to be the ideal Vulcan, the perfect little tin soldier, while they've looked down their noses and nit-picked you half to death. _Now_ you put a toe out of line and suddenly you need babysitters? Fuck that noise. What are they gonna do next, toss you in a cell _with_ me?"

"Not if we present ourselves and our bond before High Council and Curia, fully acknowledging and accepting the responsibilities it entails." The words are so hollow that their deadly asseveration cannot be denied, even without the mention of the most mysterious oversight committee on Vulcan. 

They _are_ cornered-- to the point Jim doesn't even chastise himself for implying mutual entwined self-interest. Once more, the sensation of incipient engulfment by an amatory force-- fond, soothing, but ultimately so much more powerful than his own psyche-- licks along Kirk's spine. It is no different from the other mental embraces he has experienced from Spock today but, this time, something about the newly enforced raw reality of their predicament and his own revulsion towards enforced helplessness in general make Jim's very _self_ flail blindly away. There is an edge in his mind, at once foreign and terribly familiar. He has trod this knife's edge once before, almost two decades ago, felt its kiss like the needles prepared for a mystic's feet, and that was enough to sear its existence into memory indelibly. It is the internal terra incognita, the land of 'here there be dragons', beyond whose gates sanity has no traffic. It is called STOP-- stop running, stop fighting; lay down and let them catch you, know that darkness awaits behind their bludgeons; know they want your flesh for their teeth and for their bellies but understand also that the dead do not hunger, that the dead do not dream…

_*** ! KROYKAH ! ***_

It is not a word Jim understands intellectually and certainly not one he hears physically, for all it seems to make his ears ring. Its meaning and its unbridled terror are instead communicated directly to his mind, more abundantly clear than any word of his own native tongue. Tremors of that same fear-- for the self and for the mirror of the self-- pervade his body to such a degree that it takes him several minutes to realize Spock is shaking too. Almost like some physical shock shared between them,

(_'prick you and I bleed,' he thinks nonsensically_)

a mangled moan in the Vulcan's chest to echo Kirk's own quivering innards. Jim feels and hears the heave of a breathless gasp behind him, followed by a faint but unmistakable sound, ugly in its very improbability. As blindly as he mentally fled, he returns instinctively to console, as frantic to check for damage as he would be with his own body. He reaches back, awkward, encircled by arms that are now like steel bands. His hand finds the point of an ear, fingers fumbling lower, encountering on one high cheekbone a single drop of moisture he is glad he cannot see-- for to see is to believe.

"I'm here, Spock," Jim says, because he cannot and will not apologize. After all, no scorpion has ever repented of its essential nature to sting. In truth, he does not fully understand what just happened in his own mind, though he acutely comprehends the Vulcan's reaction to it. Spock fears for both Jim's sanity and his own, the concept of individual survival tied up so inextricably with that of his _t'hy'la_

(_What **is** that word? Like music… Kirk can almost see the strokes and swirls that form it, reach out and trace its meaning like hieroglyphs imparting wisdom after so many mute millennia._)

as to make them a single entity in the telepath's consideration. Within all of this, the human can sense that Spock perceives _Jim_ to be the more valuable component; the light required to cast the shadow, that which grants the darker aspect its very existence. 

(_A nightmare image, the subject of sacred paintings and bas-reliefs. For Surak maintained that fear must be cast out, and what defeat could be more horrifying and grotesque than this? Not the requisite gruesome portrayal of indiscriminate bloodshed, bodies carved or sketched dispatched in an almost circular perimeter; each protruding bone, severed tendon, and gouged sightless socket unflinchingly described. Violence is unwholesome, now considered a last resort but, for thousands of centuries before The Way, it was simply a fact of life. No, such things may be distasteful, but they do not shock. It is the inevitable center of the illustrated milieu-- the focus of the image, a single slain warrior arranged in dignified repose while another being-- bloodied, but with no outward mortal wounds-- resting at his feet, no longer worthy of laying at his bondmate's side even in death. In the face of inadequacy at its most abject, the failure to guard that which is most precious… what else can be done save to perpetrate the slaughter of the offenders, and then deliberately and consciously stop the beating of one's own undeserving heart?_)

That's too much. Too much feeling to invest in one person, too much value to place on a vulnerable and ultimately mortal free agent, who might anyway abandon you in the established pattern of all sentient beings. Clumsily, like a child fumbling with a second language-- basic nouns and verbs but no sense of grammar or arrangement-- Jim tries to make Spock understand that the Vulcan is giving far too much credence in a temporary mental state, no matter how precarious. Kirk himself would much rather have ignored the entire incident the moment it was over. There are some things you carry with you like severed limbs, impossible to reattach, useless reminders of agony that quickly riddle with decay but are nevertheless impossible to leave behind, because they are _yours_. You're aware of the weight, of the likelihood of unwholesome eggs and squirming larva seated therein, but you _just don't look_, no matter how putrid the stench becomes.

"Do not, do _not_… _Eit'jae nash-veh_\---" the captor tapers off, inhaling deeply and falling into a silence which seems laden with a listening quality. Jim is pretty sure his message has gotten through, at least in part. For all Spock's physical hold may be just short of crushing, his mental presence is now no more than a conciliatory brush, as a penitent might fearfully kiss the trailing robe of a priest. 

"Sure, fine, okay," Jim says aloud, dismissive in that manner reserved for profound subjects best left undiscussed. It's a curious thing when a prisoner finds himself attempting to reassure (Kirk will not use the word 'comfort') his subduer. "Come on, Spock," he mutters, by way of final explanation, "I can barely stand on my own two feet. You _know_ I'm not firing on all cylinders."

"You are dehydrated and malnourished," Spock affirms, seizing on this rationale with an alacrity that almost negates its logic. The clinical tone is also somewhat ruined by the soothing circular motions of his thumbs over the skin of Jim's upper arms. Then, more softly, as though conspiring to keep the notion that James Tiberius Kirk might be mortal secret even from the surrounding stones, "You have subjected yourself to physiological abuse many could not withstand at all. The desperation of your flight has been predicated on fallacious assumptions, which I inadvertently reinforced by withholding facts about the nature of our bond. I have a small field med-kit and wish to render aid, but I require your verbal consent to do so."

Kirk honestly doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at Spock's thorough but utterly predictable state of preparedness. In this moment, the being holding him sounds every inch the meticulous administrator Jim played chess-- and locked horns-- with for two otherwise stultifying years at the clinic. There's no trace of the earlier panic, and any slight bit of moisture that may have transferred to the captive's finger has long since dried. The whole thing could easily have been a hallucination and, when Jim is back in his right mind, he'll appreciate having such a ready explanation to shore up his own denial. For now, he is-- as always-- torn between grudging admiration for the other being's sheer discipline and a sort of half-horrified resignation to the same. 

(_It's so easy to buy the hype, especially when it comes to so calculating and indomitable a species. As with all the best deceptions, the majority of Vulcans themselves likely believe and accept their own artificial construct, relentlessly internalizing and reaffirming it in a sort of spiritual sterilization until life imitates the holy rhetoric of dispassion. Certainly, the Kolinahru who reached for Jim's mind had been a being of startlingly alien homogeneity, like some natural rock so methodically polished to generic shape that it was indistinguishable from a manufactured simulacra. Not bad or evil or even necessarily wrong-- but still so wholly devoid of vitality or imagination that the human could not help his utter and instinctive revulsion.  
Spock is the opposite-- Spock is all the expectations of Tu'Surak turned inside out and upside down, a being moving pawns in three dimensions while the rest of Vulcan sees only that which is visible from their perspective of a flat board. They don't get it, of course. Even Spock himself doesn't see the sheer cleverness of his own adaptation, like an aerialist whose stunning feats can only be performed as long as they don't look down. That's half the point, for James T. Kirk can personally attest that an exoskeleton is armor disguised as vulnerable skin-- evolution's very own sleight of hand._)

"Go ahead," Kirk says, mulishly acquiescing to treatment and then compounding this by being visibly irritated at the ease with which the Vulcan restrains both the fugitive's hands with a single one of his own. Reaching under his mantle and long high-collared tunic, Spock swiftly retrieves an impressive selection of hypos from a hidden pouch. They look like a steely fistful of old-fashioned straws, thin and capped with narrow bands of color to differentiate use. The latter indicates they're the kind which can be individually formulated and loaded which, given Jim's storied history of bizarre and sometimes inexplicable reactions, is something of a relief.

(_'Even your immune system is a brat!" Bones has despaired on more than one occasion. After two separate incidents of wild allergic reactions during seemingly routine clinic physicals, Spock had decreed-- fellow inmate or no-- that McCoy would be the _only_ physician attending Citizen Kirk._)

"All of these medicaments have been synthesized with consideration for your immune sensitivity. Do you believe me so careless, _taluhk_?"

"No, no, you're very thorough," the human responds dutifully. Then, with an edge of flippant malice like an uppercut delivered after the referee's bell has rung, "Heaven forbid I should croak before you can fuck me."

Ah, it looks like there are still a few shiny buttons for Jim to push after all! Any later remorseful, softer, and likely delusional reactions aside, he was starting to feel slighted. Given that he's only person who has ever been able to locate the Vulcan's temper, he's had miserable luck divining its subcutaneous hiding place during their current little debacle. It's heartening to find some familiar footing amidst this cascade of revelations from without and within. If nothing else, he _enjoys_ playing the rogue provocateur to this most erudite of classicists. 

"You will not demean yourself thus," the syllables are quiet but clipped, uttered right next to his ear. Spock sounds positively puritanical-- there's a score for the home team. "I will not force myself on you, in any capacity."

Loathe to mention the destabilizing kiss, Kirk settles on, "And I suppose mates consummate their bonding merely by holding hands?" The barb comes out half-hearted at best, not only due to the differing social significance of the act described but in the more potent thread of disbelief. Kirk himself can't really credit the threat of criminal rapaciousness he's just implied-- not from Spock. His unexpected companion and foe has many facets, some of the them undeniably alien, but Jim no more thinks the other being capable of such heinous violation than he believes the Vulcan can sprout wings and fly. 

As always, the response he receives is more devastating in its artlessness than any heated comment the human might hope to elicit. "It is my hope that you will receive me with empathy and compassion, when the Time comes."

Though Jim can hear the clear capitalization and emphasis in the statement, he chooses to ignore it, just as he willfully dismisses the notion of ever being maneuvered into a position of  
(_temptation_)  
sexual compromise with Spock again. The ambush of a kiss was undeniably neat and effective, but it only works once. Like any skilled gambler, Kirk knows the difference between risk and a bad bet that can't be covered. If he has any concern for the Time Spock so enshrines with obscure meaning, it is only to acknowledge that the clock is on _his_ side. Surely the Vulcan must know Jim won't make this easy, from the broadest implications of their connubial estate to the most paltry daily interaction. Present detente aside, history tells him that, if he cannot force the enemy to retreat out of hand, he will simply have to make the cost of occupation impossible to sustain. Though he may regret the wounds he inflicts during he campaign, he has been trying to tell Spock all along that he is not made for this complacent galaxy of hyper-rationality and regulation.  
_Caveat emptor_.

"Perhaps we neither of us are suited to the situations in which we were born," his captor remarks, in a typically irritating mixture of commiseration and philosophical surmise. Editorializing Kirk's stream-of-consciousness has not distracted him from his purpose; he has applied two painless hypos in Jim's upper arm, and is now gently encouraging the human to lean forward so that the next set may be administered to his neck. "_Kaiidth_."

The fugitive snorts-- if there's a single word of Vulcan every citizen in the Protectorate understands, that's the one. Bones maintains that the official translation is a sham, and that the true meaning is, 'Because I said so'.

"While there are no contraindications with the other medications, I am obliged to warn you that drowsiness is commonly reported following the application of this particular analgesic," Spock says, giving Jim just enough time to protest before employing the latest hypo. 

"Convenient." Kirk is uncertain whether his own response is verbal, or only a wisp of thought. It doesn't matter. He lies back once more, head cradled in the hollow of Spock's shoulder while his body is ministered to with that odd mixture of neutrality and veneration. He considers the sweet and endless dreams that might visit a hangman between the release of the trap door and the snapping of the neck; he thinks of this present moment with Spock-- of all the strange, quiet little moments with Spock-- the way a soldier dozing in his foxhole might look back on memories of life and their own self before the shadow of war. Idly, a certain phantom comes into his recollections-- a being whose pretense to the role of teacher was only slightly more convincing than that of 'human'-- pointing to paper boats racing sedately in a creek as yet unchoked by bloated colonies of spores. Each little craft was unique, said the necrotic voice from behind its clever facade, but what did it matter? Each too would take on water and sink, unmourned as they were ill-made by childish hands, just as the Creator's undeserving works must be cast aside. Within Spock's hold, the flimsiness of the metaphor-- which once filled a particular young boy with vague and nameless discouragement-- is readily apparent. Now more than ever, Jim's body feels like a vessel, but this time it is a consecrated one. Perhaps that conveyance which holds the  
(_katra_)  
soul is far more resilient and deserving of dignity than anything that by-gone butcher might mock. 

Some untold chain of moments later, most of the pain is already in abeyance, it's true severity notable only now that it is gone. The majority of this is most likely the telepath's doing-- no hypo works _that_ fast-- but Jim can't find it in himself to protest, too enthralled by the unfamiliar heat and support around him and too abjectly grateful for that unique sensation which is the absence of prolonged agony. Spock has just depleted his medical arsenal, thumb lingering a fraction too long and with far too caressing a brush against the site of the last application, when the sharp tones of a communicator trill almost flagrantly from his belt. The noise is as irritating as it is meant to be, designed to demand action, and Kirk is not particularly inclined to accommodate Spock's reaching for it. His companion seems even less than receptive to the interruption, body tensing and then deliberately melting again to ensure the comfort of the one presently reclining upon it. The frustration is apparent in tone as well-- not as emotion, but rather in the particularly bland staccato of speech, though the exchange itself is in Vulcan. Jim can feel it too through the smooth contact of the telepath's skin, like the distant whistle of desert wind through the shafts of long-lost wells. The GOL really _are_ checking up on them-- both of them as a unit, a variable, a distastefully irrational factor which must now be compensated for. Spock seems, in some ways, surprised by how much uninterrupted time they have been granted. The leniency is suspect. 

It is also, however, a reminder of outside forces; of standards and expectations beyond the intricately minimalist galaxy they have conjured between them. Neither of the pair is quite ready to relinquish this protective sphere, no matter how ephemeral it has become. The Vulcan stows the communicator back in his belt efficiently and without comment but, when his hands are once more visible, they hold in its place a set of familiar dull mesh-like grieves. 

"You, me, and handcuffs," Jim comments, halfway sing-song and all the way on reflex. "I'm starting to think you _like_ tying me up, Spock. Anything you'd like to share with the rest of the class?" 

Spock doesn't rise to the bait, focusing instead entirely on fitting the restraints properly. Though the traditional human parlance of 'handcuffs' has persisted its way into Standard, the objects themselves bear only a passing resemblance to the antique chains or zip-ties of pre-Protectorate Earth. Running from elbow to to wrist, they look more like the gauntlets of ancient gladiators, with optional flexible extensions to suit the digits and appendage structure of the offending species. In the case of humanoids, the main purpose is to immobilize the thumb-- with limited fine motor options, the wrists themselves may be granted slightly more latitude and so remain unbound by any visible tether. Instead, nanotechnology integrated into the fabri-metal mesh itself is set to a frequency which can be adjusted to allow a specific amount of magnetized 'give'. The default setting, as well Jim knows from innumerable personal incidents, is about a meter's range of motion-- enough to prevent accidents and accommodate different builds without providing the opportunity for anything more untoward. 

Regardless of allowance, the magnetic association between each grieve eliminates the presence of any chain or cord a prisoner might employ to jump, leverage, strangle, or otherwise harm an arresting officer. Somewhere on Spock's person, too, is an almost microscopic transponder which further ensures the cuffs-- and the unfortunate wearer of said-- cannot exceed a certain radius of distance from the enforcer. The fabri-metal is dynamic, responsive to the officer's input, and adheres so well to the bearer that wiggle room and other little ticks used by escape artists of the past are obviated out of existence. There's no pain invalid if the limit is trespassed, but there's something so ludicrous about the harsh 'thud' of one's own body against an invisible barrier that just adds insult to injury. The first time it happened to Kirk, then a prepubescent fireball of defiance, he'd flushed even further with shame, unable to dispel sequences of certain vintage slap-stick cartoons that sprang readily to his mind's eye/ Averse to executive brutality and abuse though they may be, the _Togolausu_ have no such compunction about the ego. 

Which is not to say that the technology is completely fool-proof.

(_'A fact I'm not shocked _you_ discovered,'_ McCoy had groused during one round of famous Tiberian boasting, _'being practically the king of fools yourself.'_)

The technology is vulnerable to EMP disruptors, exposure to polarized electromagnetic substances, and can be short-circuited by certain Cardassian personal hygiene products. Jim is enough of an optimist that being forced to accept the bonds (and isn't _that_ a loaded word, now) does not fill him with any concrete discouragement beyond the rueful acknowledgement that useful tools to facilitate their destruction aren't exactly going to fall into his lap. 

More disconcerting is the care with which Spock checks the fit of the cuffs, and the way their shadows merge together on the dusty, pebble-strew floor of the canyon. Almost as if he can't help himself, Spock then draws two reverent fingers down slowly across the human's grimy palm. That mystifying gesture carries more weight than a thousand iron shackles, and Kirk combats the accompanying surge of warmth by picturing how they must look, standing amidst and outré landscape. Like the only two players in an amateur drama so deliberately avant-garde that the audience is completely lost. 

Here they are, the crisply arrayed, parsimonious scholar-prince and this wild-child of space-lane caravanserai, who survived his first exposure to civilization with only a chip on his shoulder and severely disordered eating habits to show for it. For all his independent study, natural curiosity, and voracious reading, Kirk has in his official record only a Basic Education Degree and a work history so varied and dubious that even temporary manual labor agencies shudder when they look at it. Spock, meanwhile, is a graduate of the VSA with so many letters and doctoral indicators after his name that the dozens of programs and monographs he's authored practically need a separate appendix to accommodate them. Yet only _this_ impossible Vulcan has had the ability or personal inclination to halt the blazing, self-destructive comet of James T. Kirk as he sped towards _Sashavau_. This telepath-- who ought to see into the human's psyche and damn well know better-- insists on taking the snarling half-savage to bond, though a tragic and damning ending has almost certainly already been written in blood. He may resent the other being with a tender and scathing sympathy, he may love him with a boiling and caustic anger but, in this moment, all Kirk can do is laugh at the sheer absurdity of the entire situation.

While the Vulcan's fingers and the electrifying weight of his gaze communicate a sort of fond but largely uncomprehending resignation, he has no direct response to the human's merriment.  
Thus, while he could recite it by heart himself, Jim simply continues chuckling, magnanimously allowing Spock to read him his rights and formalize the arrest.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> … *sigh* Still no porn, but at least some bondage finally found its way in? ;-)
> 
> Glossary/Notes:  
(All translations sourced from the [VLD](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/) unless otherwise indicated)  
[+] _tal-kam_\- dear.  
[+] _qui'lari_\- facial focal points for Vulcan touch telepathy.  
[+] desperado decoy- (Chess) using a doomed piece to do as much damage as possible before it is captured. Also a sacrifice that causes a stalemate.  
[+] _Sashavau_\- exposed, open, unprotected.  
[+] _Togolausu_\- enforcer.  
[+] _kwai-ashayam_\- wild/untamed beloved.  
[+] _Eit'jae nash-veh_\- 'I beg'.  
[+] _taluhk_\- 'treasure/cherished'  
[+] _caveat emptor_\- (Latin) 'Buyer beware'. 
> 
> As always, I would really love to know what you think, even if it's only to weigh in on exactly how many shirts you think Jim goes through in a fiscal year. (I'm sure Spock knows the exact number, since he's the one writing reports that sound reasonable enough for the quartermaster to keep sending replacements. ^_~)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jim persistently needles his Vulcan, a glimpse into the past is had, and Spock learns he should perhaps keep his sartorial commentary to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, I still exist (I never get the memos on these things). My deepest appreciation to those who continued to leave hits, kudos, and comments on this piece in the interim. Your encouragement helped shake me out of my ennui! I can't thank you enough.
> 
> As always, nothing portrayed in this fictional society necessarily has the author's endorsement, nor is it a commentary on anything happening/existent in RL. I don't know about you, but I need a serious break from 2020. So pack your bags, kids, we're headed to the other side of the Alpha Quadrant! ;-)
> 
> **Trigger Warnings**: Brief implications of legalized sex work, non-graphic references to underage abuse (Tarsus), cultural misinterpretations of signals/flirtation.  
**Additional Warnings/Enticements:** Pseudo-science, brief reference to ST:ENT, more telepathic foreplay, soul-bond tropes, first-meeting flashbacks, Jim in lace-up leather trousers, and general Klassic Kirk aversion to staying fully clothed.

Whatever delusions the Vulcan may hold in regards to their connection (or, as Kirk intends to scrupulously maintain, lack thereof), Spock still knows Jim well enough that he makes no attempt to subject the human to the indignity of being carried. 

Analgesics now decidedly unfurled in his veins, adrenaline and cortisol bone dry as any premodern petrol engine, Jim's thoughts have taken on a cloudy abstract quality which is not quite numbness. It seems, rather, to be an issue of mental depth perception, as when a known and expected step fails to materialize underfoot. While not unpleasant-- if sand were to somehow possess a soothing texture, it would be not unlike feeling oneself half-buried in warm, silky particles against the chill of approaching night-- it isn't exactly helpful either. Pericolosa VII's labyrinthian northern canyon system is even more complex than it appeared upon initial entry, and Jim did not exactly make his way in with any intention of returning by the same route. At the top of his game, he could make fairly quick work of orienting himself by noting ancient traces of water erosion and more recent wind action but, in his present state of exhaustion, he's not sure he could have made it far from the sheltering cave even if Spock had not come to confront him. Kirk could very easily have wandered further into the natural maze, unable to find any meaningful exit amidst the narrow defiles, finally collapsing in exhaustion. Likely in embarrassingly short order. If only Spock hadn't been spear-heading the posse of GOL pursuers, Jim could have lain there in the vacillating marsh-light of the suns until they, and the winds whistling with careless rapaciousness through the rocky apertures, rendered of his flesh at last only clean white bone. A cute little puzzle for some future archeologist or prospector, assuming one ever came to this godforsaken spot. 

A prickle of vexation-- decidedly not his own-- makes itself known along the back of Jim's neck, a phantom droplet of acidic sweat. He flashes his own sour glance at the being who has taken him prisoner, but the Vulcan does not pause or react as he brings his rather lengthy legal recitation to a close. Everlasting fires of every species' hell, Spock is actually so punctilious as to ensure the arrest is legitimate down to the finest detail. The Protectorate version of Miranda Rights includes (along with the right to remain silent and access to a court-appointed lawyer) the services of an Adept to access mental competency and the option to defer trial until treatment for any chemical dependency has been rendered. Kirk would be irritated, if not for the knowledge-- a tattoo beat now entwined with the numbed throbbing of his own migraine-- that the dry ritual is also an attempt on Spock's part to regain familiar footing. The hypos have obviated the pain in his skull, but they cannot immediately relieve a cycle of tension and constriction whose roots have been burrowing for days, nor can they remove the lingering impression of mind sliding against mind. He resents the certainty of a confirmed, if slight, weakness in the Vulcan; finds it highly suspect because its source is so clearly external rather than his own intuition. Jim landed more than a few hits during their impromptu wrestling match, most of them glancing save for the knock to the _chenesi_, the latter of which the human is willing to admit was a low blow. None of these caused abrasions or broke the desert-hide skin, yet Spock is bleeding never the less. He's bleeding mentally, sluggish and already clotting, but perceptible now that Kirk knows what to look for. There's a heavy taint in the soft little starbursts which have been drifting, largely unnoticed, on the tides of the renegade's subconscious ever since his flight from Elba II began. The formerly buoyant etherial clusters, like the wind-borne seeds of the   
(_khara bush_)  
poplar tree, come to him now as though weighed down by  
(_impossible_)  
rain. 

Wrinkling his nose in suspicion, Jim draws a deep breath and closes his eyes. He may be telepathically blind or mute-- however you want to frame it-- but he has _something_, a stubborn bedrock at the core of his being which, according to Spock, is measurable if not exactly identifiable. Despite the ridiculousness of the image, Kirk latches onto the sudden analogy of two kids stuck in the backseat of a hovercar. Properly harnessed in, squabbling around their limited mobility, exhausted by a trip that has already exceeded their attention spans. Like one of these children, he pulls back in the limited space he perceives, giving Spock a _shove_ in the darkness of his own mind…

… apparently causing himself to sway once more on his own feet. The physical sensation of this minor peril hits him about two seconds before a strong Vulcan arm snakes around his back to keep him upright. 

"I can confirm the success of your experiment," Spock says, dark eyes very close when Jim opens his own. "I would suggest, however, that any further trials you wish to perform are better suited to more controlled environs." The warden is disturbingly unruffled, no sign of the mental wince Kirk thinks he _may_ have sensed. Christ, forget chess-- this is like playing poker in the dark. Utter silence too, since his adversary isn't exactly the sort to have a habit of fondling chips.

'Certainly not like he was fondling your ass,' the unhelpful portion of his brain points out. Because it is unhelpful, it sounds a great deal like Bones and has the nerve to be right. Spock is presently supporting him with a firm grip on the human's hip, right where the permahide trousers ride low-- pinky and adjacent finger resting on the material of the waistband, thumb and its fellows anchored with a secure yet somehow hesitant covetousness against actual flesh. Kirk has been groped far more intimately by perfect strangers and customs officers alike; this touch is perfectly chaste by any standard, or it would be if not for the fact it is being perpetrated by a Vulcan. Particularly-- and Jim knows he's fixating on this, but it bears repeating-- an _ungloved_ Vulcan. 

"For fuck's sake, Spock," Jim grits out, making no attempt to free himself and so once more go sprawling, though it is a near thing. For the time being, he decides to place uncharacteristic value on his dignity rather than useless acts of recalcitrance. "Put your gloves back on." It sounds inane and prudish, but he doesn't trust himself to say anything else. Not about hoping his little trick was annoying-- he'll settle for playing obnoxious mental mosquito to Spock's psyche, at least in the short term-- and certainly not that it should serve as an illustration, however small, that their struggle is far from over. James Tiberius Kirk intends to make S'chn T'gai Spock's life hell. His opponent is deluding himself about more than just being _telsu_ if he thinks he's won. No matter how legitimate those unvoiced threats are or the gravity with which they would have been delivered, the human knows now is not the time for such things. It would only seem like bluster in this context.

If Spock is aware of these adversarial thoughts, he gives no indication, accepting the puritanical chastisement with an equanimity that effectively dries up whatever other nonsense might spill from Jim's mouth. From some cleverly concealed pocket are withdrawn a pair of _sahriv oluhk_ gloves-- synthetic, of course, but exacting in every detail as only stringently realistic Tu'Surak artisans can produce. Each simulated scale is perfect, black on black matte that shades to the finest embossed iridescence only when lit at the perfect angle. The human watches those pale, deadly, and knowing hands vanish beneath a void-hide shot with indigo and emerald, feeling not the slightest bit of relief. Instead of being reassured by a decent concealment Spock himself should find preferable, Jim is left with the feeling that he's just been treated to the galaxy's most bizarre and exotic reverse strip-tease.

His own accouterments thus righted, the Vulcan takes advantage of his temporarily poleaxed prisoner, drawing the the cloak off his own shoulders and draping it confidently about those of the human. A deft movement fastens the clasp before Kirk's brain can draft a protest. 

"There is no reason to prolong your exposure to Pericolosa Prime or its companion," the Vulcan says, every inch the custodian of yet another wayward and logical being. " Their cumulative effects can be deleterious and deceptive. Our transport has been fitted with polarizing shields and those garments you procured upon arrival were designed to mitigate ultraviolet saturation, but your present state of undress is unhelpful and," there is just the thinnest trace of a pause, so slender Kirk may have imagined it, "exposes vulnerable areas which may accrue damage more readily."

"You make it sound so indecent," Jim quips, trusting his instincts and mustering them to leverage against this infinitesimal chink in Spock's armor. It helps combat the delicious sense of shelter the seemingly innocuous borrowed garment inspires. There is nothing luxurious or even remarkable about it, cut and cloth utilitarian as most products of Vulcan are, though it does carry the faint scent of incense ubiquitous to the planet and her people. More readily apparent, even to Jim's limited human nose and present rather impressive personal pungency, are the lingering traces of aloe, almond, and Alkadian water-root-- all primary ingredients in the lotion he knows Spock uses to moisturize and protect his hybrid skin. While not a physical olfactory aspect-- can a psyche exude its own aroma?-- there's always been a flavor of the autumnal surrounding this particular Vulcan. For all the being is a child of fierce desert sands, Kirk consistently perceives the faded traces of ancient spices and igneous rock still tenaciously guarding warmth it once knew, of darkening days and rituals meant to coax back the light. 

These thoughts chase one another capriciously beneath the framework of Kirk's broader strategic mindset; they feel illicit, almost giddy, as though slathered in Romulan ale. The dreamlike quality of the situation-- something the outlaw previously noted and therefore should have already filed away-- keeps rudely reasserting itself. He distrusts the persistence of the feeling. Not because he is daunted by the fraying edges of reality or because he doubts his ability to navigate the chaos (hell, according to McCoy, he _is_ an agent of chaos), but because the rotting veins of jagged panic which always accompany his experience with altered states simply _aren't there_. No matter how much he hates the iron-barred constrictions of anxiety, its absence is alarming, and he cannot summon the suffocating trepidation no matter how hard he tries. Spock is with him, and the Vulcan negates that corrosive void with his very presence. 

Unconsciously, unwillingly, Jim matches his captor's rhythm as they turn together, back towards the footprints already rendered almost indistinguishable by the wind and dispersion of fine wasteland dust. A situation that seemed bleakly humorous as Spock was binding him now feels full of portent, like an arabesque carved naturally into the curving grain of the universe. Kirk balks and the warden-- damn his _katra_ to the nonexistent Vulcan hell-- halts in perfect concert, denying the human an excuse to trip or lose balance again. Jim stares stubbornly at his own feet, feeling along the edges of his earlier hysteria and knowing without a single glance that-- in the paradoxical manner of all telepathic phenomena-- Spock stands guardian before/beside/behind him, dedicated as any any soldier meant to cover the flank of a fellow sniper. 

"As I recall," his subduer interrupts what has only been a few objective moments of silence with a typically bland observation. "You have a penchant for ineffective garments." The Vulcan slips an arm beneath the fall of the borrowed clock, steadying Kirk that they might walk almost as some exotic singular quadruped, back towards the hunter's point of ingress. The prisoner considers the absurdity of old children's games-- the three legged race-- and even the old Platonic image of the being before the gods tore it asunder into miserable and ever-seeking halves. Not comfortable thoughts, but ones well-suited to combat the awareness that Spock's gloved hand is still all too warm where it rests watchfully against the base of his spine. Jim feels his own fluctuating emotions keenly, a pendulum swinging too widely to be tolerated. If it's making _him_ dizzy, he hopes it fucking well gives a certain eavesdropping telepath whiplash. 

"Haven't been in much of a position to dress according to my own tastes in a along time," the fugitive grumbles, "so why should you sound so judgmental?" The distaste on his face is only half-theatrical. The atmosphere of the facility on Elba II always put him oddly in mind of the ancient and unsettling Terran practice called 'taxidermy'. The hideous irony of wild creatures manipulated and affixed to ape life; slightness glass eyes still somehow horribly knowing, quivering vitals replaced with sawdust bearing ten thousand splinters. The sameness of his days in custody felt similarly frozen, seige-like, making the mind feel uncomfortably stuffed with cotton and the tongue like raw spatulate meat from ennui. What use was talking; what was there to talk _about_? The mental diversions and periods of exercise so graciously provided by the Vulcan professionals became routine, as numbing as they were intended to be absorbing, in the same way a dish is rendered tasteless by continuous consumption. 

'It's still food,' the little scarecrow within Jim would respond, recalling all too easily those days when listlessness stemmed from lack of protein. When he laid for hours with his cheek against the dirt watching dust motes or spores drift in their bolt-hole's single shaft of sunlight, barely able to rouse himself to defecate or comfort the younger children when they fussed. Unapologetically extending the slightly inappropriate metaphor, Jim read voraciously whilst on Elbra II, adding three new spoken languages and one bio-computational lexicon to his already impressive repertoire. Given his offenses, he had not been permitted publications on actual programming or a terminal on which to practice, but it still passed the time. Access to fiction (always something that provoked in Vulcans the sort of politely scandalized Edwardian response to the excesses of jazz) was similarly restricted for all in-patient residents: nothing that could be considered offensive in any of the hundred of cultures boasted by the Protectorate, nothing that would rile 'blood-lust' or 'encourage skewed thought patterns'. Obviously, anything considered salacious by Vulcan standards was similarly excluded. 

(_'Basically the whole kit and caboodle,' Bones never hesitated point out. He apparently longed for some Zane Grey, or the Robin Hood-like heroes of middle Aurigan literature._)

Censorship on that level was hardly a hallmark of _Kol-Ut-Shan_ or the Protectorate's socio-cultural management policies in general, but it was felt by the administration that the inmates of Elba II had already proven themselves too unbalanced and irresponsible to be allowed the same intellectual latitude afforded to the compliant citizens of the junior races (to say nothing of their physical liberty). Those confined to the facility (for their own protection, and to avoid the contamination of the more balanced populace) were like unruly children, carefully monitored with an unflagging patience that put the millennia-long efforts of erosion or entropy to shame. In accordance with the patient's individual species and the delicate nature of the Vulcan olfactory sense, these beings were groomed and bathed to be uniformly scentless, clothed in shapeless jumpsuits, meticulously catalogued-- stored and shelved, that is, like butterflies under glass. Such curiosities! 

Thus confined, without and within, Jim has therefore spent hours arguing with Scotty about minute details of non-Euclidean geometry he might have otherwise deemed uninteresting. It explains his vast tolerance for Chekov's increasingly outlandish tales of Russian ingenuity, and why he can now recite the first thirty seven verses of the Andorian creation epic from memory, in the original dialect. A depressed Cardassian spent a week's worth of 'socialization sessions' explaining the sensitivity of neck ridges in a manner so frank as to make even Kirk blush; a Bolian not only taught him to play their infamous Or'Mata-Ookush (a game involving eight pebbles, executed solely with the toes) but to play it _well_. He knows the entire life history of one Leonard Horatio McCoy and, in exchange for the taciturn Southerner's confidences, has admitted that he himself was one of the meager seven survivors of Tarsus IV. No more than that-- Jim is not built, or rather has not rebuilt himself, to explain further. He didn't have to; Bones had made a sound not unlike that of a man punched ruthlessly and without warning, uttering a soft 'oh, Jimmy', after which the matter had never been spoken of again.   
It is the most touching response to the whole sorry mess that Kirk has ever encountered.

Upon effecting his unexpected escape from Elba II, Jim clothed himself in whatever was available, environmentally appropriate, and least likely to draw attention to himself. He has never been one to accumulate a great many person possessions, nor to have any compunction about abandoning them when circumstances dictate he must. Tarsus had rendered his alienation from Protectorate society complete; he is a creature made ruthless by privation in a galaxy of plenty, adapted to the unpredictable whims of Providence where all else is regulated into calm, watchful and practical as an animal which suffers itself to 'play' tame. He can fake it for a while, but something always gives him away eventually. He can't _help_ himself, as his tendency towards 'hacktivism' and inability to resist assaulting the VSA servers clearly illustrates. Before Spock conclusively identified him as and arrested him for the crimes of 'Kirok', Jim had enjoyed a few consecutive years of relative stability, complete with a single place of lodging and two steady (if questionable) sources of income. It was, for him, positively revolutionary. He is not one unused to reinventing himself, yet those days seem now another life entirely. One decidedly punctuated-- _truncated_\-- by Spock's arrival during an otherwise unremarkable pre-dawn shift. 

Kirk senses more ammunition here, both in regards to his companion's unnecessary sartorial commentary and the notion of their first encounter. He is like a gifted dowser, guided towards water by a prickling of the neck or the ache of a phantom limb; if this particular Vulcan has a button, Jim inevitably gropes towards it

(_not unlike some earlier groping, eh?_)

and is promptly beset with the desire to _push_. Yes, Spock's remark may have been the magistrate's version of gentle teasing. Jim has no _proof_ the other being is capable of such a thing, couched as all observations are within a thick context of plausible deniability, but he has also never observed Spock behave in quite the same distantly-familiar manner with anyone else. Even if its true, the comment falls just shy of being a non sequitur-- typically anathema to the children of Surak. 

Pondering this anomaly for a dozen or so laborious steps, the human finds his inner absorption suddenly interrupted by an almost palpable image, like a solar flare or burst of gamma radiation cutting across the isotropic network beam. 'We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming…' 

(_The perspective is dizzying, an foreign vantage with which the mirror cannot compete. He sees himself outside himself, an existential vertigo heightened by the sheer clarity and detail beside with his own recollections pale. These intricacies, observed and recorded with such dispassionate fidelity, can only belong to Spock. No matter how alien the method of communication-- recollections as steady, if not more so, than any digitized footage-- Kirk recognizes the personal stamp of rendering the same way he would recognize the Vulcan's voice or the nearly unintelligible swirls of his Golic signature beneath brilliant calligraphy. _

_ What he sees is a human male in the dim crystal lighting of a sparsely populated bar. Without patrons, the illumination has been raised to more practical levels, reflecting like a wet sheen on polished surfaces of of faux strawberry copper and cool, cheap ebony flecked with pyrite. The establishment is not high-class; only as marginally reputable as the Risian administration will allow, though there are no true 'dives' in the Protectorate. The man is reflected a thousand times over in mirrors of gaudy carmine, lemon, and peony-- no angle can be found in which he is not portrayed as a peak specimen by 95.632% of bipedal sentient standards. From his vantage point by the entryway, the Vulcan observer instantaneously matches the kaleidoscoped visage with the holo he first viewed amongst hundreds of records from the Office of Sentient Resources. Kirk, James Tiberius: aged 23 by Galactic Standard calculation, space-born human of Terran extraction. Protectorate Citizen ID TRA-739-4108-Delta-Epsilon-825, resource value rating mild to moderate with an emphasis on manual labor and/or repetitive tasks. Education requirements filled at bare minimum, recorded offenses confined to lower-strata severity, but repetitive and rather numerous-- particularly given his age. _

_ To Jim, the observer behind the one observing, the bar seems temporarily unrecognizable. Then, separating the two threads of perception-- familiarity and the lack thereof-- he further realizes that the overwhelming lucidity of eidetic memory in general temporarily blinded him to a fact that is obvious once the 'picture' adjusts. Namely, that Spock's consideration of having located 'Kirok' is at this point only a hypothesis. One presently teetering under the weight of Vulcan cultural mores and those preconceived notions which logic may recognize but never entirely dispel. Kirk, whoever he may or may not be, continues to be the focal point of the scene. All else is relegated to what is, comparatively at least, only a sketch or suggestion of lines. _

_ The man-- the **boy**, really-- appears to Spock both much younger and far more worldly than his government profile would imply, busying himself with the upkeep of taps and inventory whilst chatting idly with a fey Caitian woman, who herself reclines half-draped across the bar. Not a customer, or so her garb-- minimal coverings that are the unspoken uniform of the more dubious and fleshly occupations-- would suggest. Her tail sways idly beneath her bead-valanced girdle with a syncopated tinkling, the white tuft at its end (in addition to the faint blue tinge to her stripes) betraying some admixture of Andorian. If she is quaintly elfin, then the bartender himself is positively **elemental**. Even from here, Spock can keenly discern the gemlike tones of eyes which, in defiance of Pleasure Quarter custom, the human has left free of kohl liner. Instead, only a faint dusting of fulvous glitter adorns his cheeks. Aesthetically, it is a sound choice-- such naturally arresting features hardly require further enhancement. Presently, the illumined chandeliers of the establishment dim, heralding the approach of 'business hours', and hair which seemed previously golden becomes a species of bronzed honey. The new 'ambience' of lighting also accentuates his garment-- or something with pretensions to such-- of loosely webbed gilt floss, sown at each intersection with rhinestones. What appeared to be painfully tight but serviceable breeches are revealed to be anything but when the human pivots to return bottles of certain ethanol-based refreshments to a high shelf. Decidedly impractical, the pants insufficiently lace up the backs of both legs and over the gluteus maximus in a manner almost more obscene than actual public nudity. _

_ This being exudes a raw sensuality so seemingly innate as to preclude the notion he might possess also the mind Spock has found so creatively, almost wickedly, elusive. This is partly an instant surmise, the basest category of thought according to the precepts of Tu'Surak. Stereotyping, while occasionally serving (or doing disservice to) lesser species as a sort of highly questionable mental shorthand, is intellectually lazy, and Spock chastises himself through his mounting doubt. The magistrate and scientist-- dressed presently as a mid-ranking Togolausu officer for this rather irregular investigation-- has himself been on Risa naught but 3.37 hours, but he is already certain he can forgo any return trip for the remainder of his natural lifespan. The Protectorate exemplifies the principles of Kol-Ut-Shan in all dealings with those less developed sentients it guides; Risa was been a pleasure planet almost since its native species developed stable colonies throughout their planetary system and so it remains. Its seedier side is tempered only by those standards which the Board of Health and 'Lesser Recreation' enforces for the well-being of 'entertainer', worker, and patron alike. _

_ Thankfully ensconced in a motorized calèche, Spock traversed seven blocks of similar venues to reach this particular house of assignation (and, doubtless, chemical recreation), their sameness discomforting despite the logic of utilizing templates. Those excesses intended to differentiate these establishments from one another were gaudy to the point of apathetic indolence. He has timed his arrival with the so-called 'off season'; in truth, a twenty-five day period during which the infamous Risan nightlife is inverted to accommodate hordes of sun-worshiping Fornaxi for their annual fertility bacchanal. Never the less, his predawn ride featured any number of lewd displays by individuals, pairs, and one notable configuration of five. The scientist in Spock is still puzzling over the anatomical logistics of that last incident, which included at least one quadruped and a cephalopod. Everywhere, the stench of copulation-- all its associated pheromones, fluids, and other excretions-- and excitation permeates air already deadened by artificial pleasure enhancers, strobes of neon at every wavelength, and the low electromagnetic impulses characteristic of organic beings seeking a physical 'satisfaction' that negates the needs of the psyche. _

_ Vulcans value the harmonious alignment of individuals-- thought-patterns, personality… 'aura', if one must be so vulgar and imprecise. Order: achieved through hierarchy, social stratification, interlocking circles of familial units and academic associations, creates the only conduit strong enough to successfully divert and control the blood-passion that is their heritage. It is a closed circuit which, while occasionally integrating pair-bonds from without, must at all times remain conscious of even and equitable distribution, like the Terran ant poised and dependent on the surface tension of water. The junior races, even those gifted with telepathic faculties, cannot conceive of its intricacy nor of the obligation it exerts upon each and every breathing child of Tu'Surak. Spock's own mental shields have been found faultless by the most determinedly critical telepathic educators, and they are more than equal to the task of protecting him here. They do not bend, they stand resolute; Spock is both the katra which rules the mind and the telepathic barricade that protects both aspects of self, be it against the careless mental emissions of the psi-null, the attack of an _ahkhinahr_ enemy, or transmissions from his own physical pain receptors. Still, there is a honeyed viscousness to the diffuse eroticism of Risa that seems to leave a too-sweet residue along his outermost defenses, like syrupy cactus-pulp dainties left rotting in the sun. Forthcoming meditation-- when that respite is allotted to him-- will involve a thorough stage of v'ree'lat, the magistrate decides, rather like one assuring themselves the luxury of a long hot bath after being forced to wade through mire._

_ _That_ is the source of his sudden self-doubt, Spock decides: Risa offends his inherent mental fastidiousness. Having deeply analyzed all facets of and variables contributing to this matter in what has been only been five seconds of discrete objective time, he may now neutralize the reaction and set it aside. ['Seeing' this memory with his human brain, 'hearing' it with his fingers, Jim Kirk finds the sheer speed of the Vulcan's processing induces a very peculiar type of psychic seasickness.] The blaring inundations of the pleasure-planet are immaterial, the most base sort of disorder. What has drawn Spock here is a very particular type of chaos-- the algorithms and subtle background processes that first sparked his interest in Kirok's handiwork. The code and manner of injection attack, both of which seemed at first only riotous defiance of every best practice in the book, possessed upon closer examination an inherent order that both contrasted and harmonized with the outwardly iconoclastic approach. The interlocking segments and subroutines were absorbing, reminiscent of fractal geometry, and decidedly… **fascinating**._

_ This mission is also in keeping with Surak's principles of legalism, justice, and the leverage of order to benefit the maximum portion of society; that Spock should pit his skills against this opponent of the Protectorate, who seems to object not by means of violence or enmity, but with a simple refusal to comply. Defiance for the sake of exercising an atrophying muscle, as a continued assertion of free will. Surely the brilliance Kirok has exhibited in both flouting and evading the authorities, while demonstrably incapable of participating directly with the rest of the citizenry, might in some manner be channeled towards more productive pursuits? Other scientists and programmers, while intrigued by the hacker's work, have been too appalled by the psychology behind it to concede anything more than its danger. These are the same investigators who have failed so utterly to end or even interrupt Kirok's colorful career. Spock is the first-- perhaps, it has been officiously intimated, due to his own hybrid mentality-- to have compiled a coherent profile and produce actual leads. His quarry is not unaware of this renewed scrutiny; the past 10.267 months have been a blur of false trails, suspiciously corrupted data, and obvious feints that would have dizzied another investigator, Vulcan or otherwise. Spock is drawn to explore every avenue of this puzzle, eliminate every false or misleading variable.   
It is a matter of professional integrity. _

_ So it is that the Spock of the past whom Kirk is presently watching-- why does telepathy have to be so exhaustingly **acrobatic**?-- does not turn and stride purposefully away from the iniquities before him. 'Let the record show,' Jim thinks with a sardonic flavor he hopes translates mentally, 'that all decisions flowed from logic, that standard operating procedure was adhered to at all times.  
Except…'_

_ Cloaked, the proverbial tall dark stranger entering the quintessential den of ill-repute, Spock is two steps beyond the vestibule when he is treated to the sight of Citizen Kirk vaulting with easy athleticism over the bar's low saloon partition. This frivolous exhibition of effort makes the Caitian girl giggle and clap, being apparently undertaken that the human might assist two small ichthyic Trigons presently making a mess with products intended to sanitize. Their ineptitude is hardly so pressing as to merit _jumping over furniture_, nor does Kirk seem in any true hurry. Indeed, he stretches as he straightens from his sound landing, smiling over his shoulder at the female and treating Spock to an unimpeded view of the low-slung, laced trousers and the cat's eye amber jewel nestled securely in the man's navel, where it winks with wicked, unabashed sexuality._)

A conflagration knocks Jim soundly back into the tangible world, a flare of instinct and attraction so vivid he almost doesn't recognize it for what it is. Three seconds later, physically stumbling under the sort of heat and pressure which must forge diamonds, he feels the simultaneous tightening of his captor's grip and the retreat of that same Vulcan's mind. Kirk swears in the polyglot manner favored by miners and day labors throughout the Protectorate, insulting the last five generations of Spock's family even as he jerks his head around to stare at the other being. 

Spock himself does not break stride, nor does the slightest waver of micro-expression show on his face. He does not blush (save perhaps at the very tips of his ears), but he does not look at Jim either, appearing utterly focused on navigating the two of them through the next narrow defile. To Kirk's limited senses, the potency of the other being's psychic presence feels diminished, further away than it than it has been since their confrontation began, though by no means truly distant. They're like two fugitives from a chain gang, the human thinks with irony; both shackled, with only so much slack available in the imprisoning lead.   
(_'Unless we are victims of each other…'_)  
Spock, it seems, has withdrawn as far as possible to regroup. 

Which clearly invites attack. Jim wishes he could laugh, the sort of tolerant, jaded chortle he'd cultivated for those highborn clients who liked a little edge or humiliation in their sex-play. The rest of the memory, or at least the attendant… potency of Spock's reaction, had been swiftly hidden by the Vulcan in question; what little he was exposed to leaves the renegade human feeling daunted and nonplussed. The seemingly frozen exterior of of Tu'Surak's children is often at odds with their desert origins-- now it seems Jim has not only discovered an iceberg whose true monolithic proportions lurk below the surface, but one whose snowy core is alive with flame. The kiss-- the _incident_, he mentally revises with stubborn underlines-- in the canyon was intense, but ultimately an outlier. It needs to _stay_ that way or the very mathematics by which he calculates his interactions with Spock (to say nothing of his personal mental health) are at risk. Kirk coughs, startled by a sliver of naiveté in his own reactions to a being he so long considered to be a sort of amicable nemesis. Left feeling so flatfooted, he hesitates to take the offensive for reasons he cannot entirely define.   
(_'Make a go of it anyway', intones a necrotic whisper from little Jimmy's very first tutor in strategy. King of monsters, eater of the dead-- may his first day in hell last ten thousand years! But he certainly knew how to control the board. 'Do it, go on. Tolerate no weakness-- evolve or die.'_)

Rallying, Jim projects a faint aura of smugness via both body language and dubious psychic ability, maintaining silence for the next several meters. At last Spock, having giving revealed no true sign of being at all discommoded, adjusts his gaze away from the middle distance to glance sidelong at his prisoner. Once more assured of attention, Kirk allows a slow, wicked smile to spread across his face-- the likes of which used to send McCoy scurrying to the other side of his cubicle, loudly disavowing whatever nonsense the younger man was cooking up. 

"So _that's_ what you thought of me!" the human purrs. "Couldn't reconcile intelligence with a nice piece of ass? How positively elitist!" He views the expected arc of that eyebrow from below his own lashes, unapologetically sultry. "I'm the total package, but you didn't know that. How did it feel, _reacting_," he leaves the word ambiguous but drenches in innuendo, "to some random trollop in a cheap little Risan den? Forget blowing you on Elba II-- we could have run your credit chit right there at the bar and you could have fucked me out of your system right then and there."

Jim expects a dry rebuttal, something utterly arid and utilizing any number of logical proverbs or reminders about the complexity of Vulcan anatomy and/or cultural mores. What he does _not_ expect is one of those infinitesimal movements around Spock's lips-- what he has always thought of the magistrate's 'not-smiles'-- and the serene reply of, "That was, in fact, my first experience with psychogenic arousal."

Kirk doesn't gape, but its an act of sheer will.

"Vulcan males cannot engage in self-gratification. It is biology, not our rigorous training, that leaves us unmoved by mere manual or visual stimulation, or any combination thereof." The other being sounds as idle and amiable as during any one of their lengthy visits over _ch'aal_ tea-- leisurely chess and a discussion of experimental dilithium generation or the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence. "There must be an outside agency-- the sense of a potential mate, detected via pheromones or telepathy. My reaction was perhaps stronger than the minor stimulus called for, likely due to the… latitude allowed by my hybrid biology in some areas. Certainly, it occurred despite particular… arrangements my parents had made. I had been focused on building and matching a psychological profile of 'Kirok' beginning approximately 6.52 days after your assault on the VSA firewalls. To couple that at last with the potency of your presence and self-possession was unexpected and highly suggestive."

"But you didn't _know_ it was me!" Kirk points out, narrowly managing to eliminate the desperation from his argument. "You saw just another pretty pleasure worker up for sale, not even a likely candidate for your profile--"

"I saw," Spock corrects with truly unwarranted gentleness, "a being who somehow reconfigured the decadence ubiquitous to Risa into something… alluring." It should be comforting that the last word is subtly rushed, as though the Vulcan does not want to hold it on his tongue too long. It isn't. "My initial assumptions were ill-founded and I was disconcerted by the contradictions of my-- shall we say, 'intuition'?"

"You were thinking with your dick," Jim sneers. "That's totally different from thinking with your gut."

"While neither organ is actually used in cogitation, you have had 2.01 years to teach me the value of intuitive reasoning," the Vulcan remarks, still far too tolerant. "I had that same period of time to begin reconciling myself to the responses only you can illicit." The gloved hand on Kirk's hip tightens briefly-- from anyone else, it would be a reassuring squeeze. "It is not to my credit that so much time elapsed before I reached the rational conclusion."

"That's still up for debate," the human points out mulishly. 

(_'Maut-klonik, vaksurik, t'nash-veh-ka…'_)

"I would not have it otherwise."

"Don't _do_ that!" Jim snaps, uncertain if he means the compliment specifically or telepathic communication in general. He tells himself he's quite averse to both, but there's a lingering intoxication to Spock's… admiration that seems far more dangerous and potentially invasive

(_can you catch… regard, affection for someone, from consistent mental exposure?_)

than mere inconvenient and at times unintelligible psychic broadcasts. Even functioning sub-optimally, Kirk has already proven he can keep Spock out if he absolutely has to. 

(_just remember, I'm not stuck in here with you… you're stuck in here with **me**_)

It's the _draw_ that worries him now. The sensation he can retrospectively trace all the way back to their first meld; that he and Spock stand almost in a loose embrace, not yet touching but always _almost_ in the act of reaching out, sheltered and sheltering. He has, upon occasion, felt it even when they were on opposite sides of the room, and it is clearly to his detriment that he did not-- could not?-- accept the knowledge at the time. It rankles, but he concedes the reality of the situation at present, telling himself he is not obliged to really examine it because he still has other, higher cards to play. 

"I am doing my utmost to exercise restraint," the Vulcan informs him, retreating to a faint but more familiar tone of lofty not-indulgence. On the whole, Vulcans either refuse to emote or, should some small slip occur, frostily deny that any such lapse was committed. Spock is the only representative Jim has ever encountered who can somehow project another flavor beneath his own calm, advertise it as logical neutrality, and dare you to call him out on the sleight of hand all at the same time. "To shield entirely would be highly unnatural at this stage and, most likely, damaging to us both. As soon as we have achieved a more conducive environment, we must make a concerted effort to stabilize the bond cooperatively." A knowing, sidelong glade punctuates the brief silence. "Attempts at obstruction would be detrimental to your own interests."

"Said the fox to the henhouse he was guarding," Kirk chirps with a sort of nasty cheer, enjoying the extra little thrill of subjecting his captor to one of Bones' many distressing barnyard aphorisms. "I promised you I wasn't going to cooperate," he smiles sweetly, blinking up at Spock in the harshening eldritch light. "And I always keep my promises."

They hold one another's gazes for several protracted beats, as though awaiting some cue. Inwardly chagrined, Jim realizes they have turned to face one another almost like dancers-- Spock's arm about the truants waist, Kirk's awkwardly bound hands resting against the warden's still immaculately pressed sleeve. The high-tech shackles give him enough leeway to accomplish this, but damned if Kirk knowns when it actually happened. They are too close again, a sense of electrified gravitas once more swelling between them. His mind's eye an obscured mirror, the human thinks of a great orb  
(_T'Khut_)  
suspended above an ancient, vanished seabed; a dusty copper desert whose ghost-waves must still somehow respond to the pull of the  
(_sister-planet_)  
moon. He does not want to be soothed or lured, but this is the exertion of a fundamental force-- a draw which has been operating since before his consciousness clothed itself in this particular form and flesh. For all his profound disavowal of anything even remotely spiritual, Jim _believes_ in this moment because the concept has made itself very nearly concrete; he can almost feel it under his hands. Heady, seductive, and absolutely terrifying. Later, he will credit himself with restraint but, in truth, it is Spock who sucks in a strengthening breath and takes action. 

Those dark eyes cloud suddenly, veiling horizontally in a way Jim cannot immediately parse, while the magistrate's free hand-- hovering in a moment's hesitation near Kirk's cheek-- reaches back to pull the hood of the borrowed cloak up over the prisoner's head. Owing to the Vulcan's greater height, the thick, practical fabric falls further over Kirk's face, effectively obscuring his vision. Indignant, Jim rears back as far as Spock's grip will allow, ready to fling an accusation of petty vengeance before two things become clear. The first is that the pounding agony in his head, while reduced by the painkillers, is further remediated by the gloom of the shadowy cowl. His eyes, which he had not realized were straining and blinking rapidly, appreciate the relief. This leads to the second consideration-- the clouding of his captor's eyes was, in fact, a closing of the Vulcan _tvi-bezhun-wein_, that cat-like second eyelid humans so often forget. 

"We will be leaving the shadow of the canyon in 1.62 miles," Spock comments, by way of explanation. "The primary star will produce increasingly disorienting light as it reaches its apex, and you seem to have misplaced--"

"Lost 'em in a sandstorm, dodging _you_\--"

"-- the goggles you procured back at port."

"Stole, Spock," Jim corrects, trusting the roll of his eyes communicates itself in his voice. "Call it what it is." Not just theft, but that of the armed variety-- if you called brandishing a rusted dirk more suited to a museum being 'armed'. Given the rarity of weapons in the Protectorate, its mere presence had been astonishing enough to get Jim what he wanted, though he suspects the unfortunate merchant expected him to die out in the wastes anyway. "As it is," his captor continues, rising above the running editorial, "a thorough examination will be required upon our return to the dreadnought to ensure you have sustained no lasting damage."

"Yeah, good luck with that," the human snorts. He feels rather like a hooded hawk, weighing the sensation and how it rankles with the ease the shielding provides. The whole situation is irritating and the timing of Spock's decision is suspect. But then, his adversary has always had some thin, lurking vein of the operatic under all that stoicism. 

"In this case, I believe the selected physician will be equal to your particular brand of patient conduct," Spock intones, vagary edging into the 'mysterious'. Now the Vulcan is positively courting the dramatic. It's not a thought Kirk bothers to hide, which elicits further commentary. "A sense of appropriate timing is hardly interchangeable with melodrama," the taller being adds, very nearly mimicking the tone Jim took when advising the warden about his dick. That sense of 'not-smile' is present, despite the fact Kirk can't see. It at last occurs to him that Spock is attempting, however inexpertly, to reestablish something of their old rhythm. He does not find this endearing, he tells himself, only poignantly naive. Bind the falcon, hood it-- one must still approach the creature with a glove and a lead, least its talons slice you to ribbons. Any natural predator, endowed by the gifts of evolution, is never truly unarmed. A jaguar with every tooth pulled from its head could still crush a man's skull with its jaw. Spock may think the bond makes them one; Jim will teach the Vulcan to have a little more self-preservation, will prove himself to be the Other and Outsider.   
Always.

"You're in an awful hurry to cover me up _now_," Jim says airily. "I think you rather liked my 'ineffective garments'. And, I'll have you know, that particular outfit was incredibly effective. I made a killing in tips in that get-up-- occasionally more than some of the dancers." Not Sulu, of course, but Sulu danced naked in an act which culminated in a lascivious exhibition of katana skills, so Kirk maintains to this day it is not a fair comparison. He has no compunction about preening his own feathers in front of Spock, though. Imperious Tiberius can _always_ do with a strut, particularly when certain patrons (or investigators, he thinks maliciously) buy into the 'pretty boy' first impression. Jim hasn't been the sweet little thing to be forced into anyone's lap since he spat out the sealing rescue shuttle and onto Tarsus IV's hellish soil. (A parting gift for the planet, though all damned and dethroned gods knew it already had enough of his blood.) Should Spock, even if only in some dusty corner of what passes for his species' subconscious, be drawn to such a fallacy… well, that's just more leverage. It's a con Jim barely has to put effort into; the marks do most of the heavy lifting themselves, eager to find their own gratification. The magistrate wouldn't be the first to be so deceived and he's hardly likely to be the last. At least until (in a vanishingly thin possibility) Father Time kicks the shit out of Kirk for a few more rounds and he loses his looks. Such hardly appeals to the human's vanity which, while ruing the unwholesome attention his looks have garnered, so still more than a little attached to the way he turns so many heads. Which is why he will simply have to ensure that he ends as a notorious and _very_ pretty corpse. 

"I will not deny that a vast portion of randomly selected typifying sentient beings find your physical attributes highly appealing," the Vulcan replies, as though rattling off specs for a particularly powerful new computer. "Ample data exists as proof. Nor do I exclude myself from the sample pool." Then, a bit more stiffly-- perhaps he is quoting something?-- he continues, "It is hardly the definition of 'control' to be entirely without unwanted impulses. Resisting that which offers no initial temptation is inconsequential. The impetus-- the allure-- must exist, however briefly. It is the restraint and mitigating action which defines mastery of the lower ego. Moreover, I exhort you to examine the additional facets of my regard." 

It sounds so _dry_, yet Jim feels his now thankfully hidden cheeks heat. He makes no effort to turn his head and attempt to assess what he prefers to assume is Spock's lack of expression. "There is no shame--"

(_there is, perhaps, still a little_)

"in admitting physical attraction to one's mate. Within the scope of the marriage bond, it is a relatively minor matter. Mental compatibility allows for purely psychological excitation once that communion has been achieved."

Without warning, the sensation of dark, protective wings settles once more over Jim's mind-- so much more deliberate and enveloping that the heat of Spock's remembered lust. It transmutes with languid ease into the sensation of night distilled and then woven as silk, the thick comfort of a blanket riddled with unexpected starbursts of pleasure and ensureince. The incongruity of the image does not detract from its profundity, alien elements distantly related to human notions of possession/avarice/worship/devotion trying to make themselves understood. There is the impression of a hand caressing his hair, his cock being handled with dizzying solicitude, fingers gently pressing a water-rich succulent to his lips and lingering there to ensure they close around it. The desire to offer something so astonishing and singular, so arousing and satisfying, that it can be found nowhere else, and so the _k'hat'n'dlawa_ is drawn when it is Time…

The human comes back to himself to find Spock's throat beneath his clumsy hands, countermeasures in the cuffs already active and burning his wrists with an insectile crackle of electricity. He has his captor pinned against one of the large boulders that litter the widening canyons and signal the end of the labyrinth complex. Damnably calm umber eyes stare up at Kirk from a face seemingly unmoved; it cannot be that this breathing statue, this being of marble flesh, is the source of the transports Jim just experienced, but he tightens his grip all the same. The pain is swelling to replace all other bodily reactions. His wrists and forearms curdle under agonizing heat-- even if his thumbs were not immobilized, they feel as though they're ready to burn away at any moment. Jim reaches the last limits of his own impressive pain tolerance and lets go, stumbling back into a cluster of rocks thankfully positioned in such a way that he is able to keep from falling completely. The torturous sensations truncate abruptly, symptoms of nerve-hijacking technology rather than actual physiological damage. He looks numbly at the Vulcan, unable to feel the expression on his own face-- which he nevertheless suspects might be more appropriate for his would-be victim. 

He has no recollection of the intent that birthed his ill-considered action, can't think why he would have pulled such a strategically pointless stunt. Burdened with the elaborate shackles, he could never have managed to apply real pressure. Not even the eleven pounds of pressure that required to damage a human, which would have been negligable to the more more robust, desert-bred being. 

(_Is that what I intended, to see your cheeks flush viridian, to watch that erudite mouth gape stupidly for air?   
'Oh, Jimmy,' says some phantom, long since faded and forgotten, 'what have you done?'_)

That Spock has disturbed the terrified and dirt-caked boy-husk buried alive in Jim's subconscious is obvious, but the human has so alienated that aspect of memory and selfhood from this incarnation that he is largely out of touch with it himself. Yet, twice today, the horrors of Tarsus have welled unbidden in his mind-- old, foul water seeping up through a foundation. The piercing migraine, so dulled by analgesics and the shade of the hood, renews its determined sawing. It occurs to the prisoner, rather unhelpfully, that the pain was actually at its greatest abeyance when he was immersed in Spock's memories. It is possible this straining 'bond'-- whatever its true nature might be-- isn't hemorrhaging solely on the telepath's end?

"Don't you fucking _dare_\--" he hears himself begin, so ragged and soft he can still make out Spock's simultaneous statement.

"I did not--" 

They share a long look, laden with wordlessness and aching confusion.

"I intended to illustrate a point," the magistrate says, calm to an extreme that suggests the opposite. Pushing himself up off the irregularly angled boulder, he studies Jim without bothering to right his uniform, his inscrutable attention causing Kirk's stomach to swoop in what he fears might be a sympathetic reflection or twinning of guilt. "You would have me prove nothing-- you sought only to goad me." There is the barest fluctuation in his tone, a reverberation of some distant desperation down the long corridors of biology and culture which separate them. Nothing audible-- an unborn murmur, an aborted touch, movement ill-perceived from the corner of one's eye-- it still mars the harmonious tenor with a thread of helpless discord. "You are human. I know not how--"

Straightening as well-- though far less steadily and with considerably more difficulty-- Jim evaluates his adversary, feeling suddenly an exhaustion that seems the weight of centuries. To a certain degree, Spock has surprised him again. Vulcans do not make excuses, if that is what those half-uttered statements were, nor do they have need of them. They select facts from their prodigious store of knowledge and apply them methodically until the opposition is worn down. It is unlike a child of Surak-- utterly unlike _Spock_\-- to admit uncertainty

(_T'nash-veh teslu, k'shatri-ashayam_)

or leave a statement unfinished. Whatever it is, Kirk assumes he doesn't want to know. There's useful intelligence, and then there's just Vulcan mind games. 'Thinly logic-lacquered green-blooded voodoo', as Bones puts it, being thus the only individual Jim knows to point out the cognitive dissonance in (highly rumored, highly speculative) Vulcan mysticism. But then, Jim just

(_enjoyed, was ravished by_)

proof positive that the salacious sub-articulate myth of sexual prowess amongst the ruling telepathic species has _some_ basis in fact. Because he has no desire to dwell on that notion, nor any interest in watching Spock _look_ at him

(_so unflappably ordinary, composed, and yet so… lost_)

like that, Kirk turns away. Off to the east, he can see the Trip-X352 settled low to the ground on its parking struts, light from the kaleidoscopic suns glinting off the car's transparent dome. The illumination _is_ more unpleasant in the open, shadows crossing one another as the smaller companion star races towards its earlier descent. Each step he takes away from his captor is experimental-- he's weakened, yes, but he's also aware of the invisible leash, of the subsonic frequency which tethers him within a certain radius of Spock. He wonders how much allowance he's been given, pretends he is not perplexed by the distance he has already attained. He has known the magistrate to be annoyingly confident, competent, but never arrogant. So what _is_ this? 

Kirk isn't going to escape, obviously. Even if he were up to it physically, even if Spock gave him a planet's worth of latitude, there's nowhere to _go_. No plucky little junker, barely space-worthy, waiting for him on Cyroam. No Gaila to rustle up another one via her labyrinthian-- and at times alarming-- network of dubious connections and 'guy-who-knows-this-guy-who-knows-this-Betazoid'. Poor Tommy has Stonn's joyless emissaries sitting on him; there's been no mention of Kevin, but Kirk would never drag the kid into something as nasty as this anyway. There are other contacts-- less trustworthy, but easier to leverage when it's all blackmail and no sentiment-- though Jim won't be able to utilize them if he doesn't get off this rock. 

Thus he walks towards the transport, listening to the crunch of Spock's boots on the cracked dirt behind him. Occasionally, Kirk manages a few quick steps in a row, but his captor never comes abreast with him and the forcefield never stops him in his tracks. Some phrase or notion, flotsam from his voracious reading habits, makes him wonder if Spock is taking care not to fred on his shadow. Fully out of the canyon now, Kirk's only navigational obstacles are the periodic pitted markings of the dry season, the maddeningly inconstant light, and his own exhaustion. He'd been resting far more of his weight on the magistrate than he'd realized at the time, but it fortunately left him presently left him with a small reserve of strength. Still, he wastes no time in resting a surreptitious and supporting hand on the snub-nosed hood as soon as he reaches the transport. 

It's a little two-being module, resting low to the ground on its practical, retractable little tripod stand. Engine-- such as it were-- in the back, traditional 'boot' storage in the front; a smooth aerodynamic capsule with the liquid giladium antigravity generator dead center underneath. Its original inventor, Charles Tucker III, had used liquid mercury to build up the necessary electron repulsion, but more trustworthy (and better financed) Protectorate scientists had refined giladium to suit the same purpose at half the amount. That a human had been able to remain so integral in the practical development of their own conceptual innovation was-- and is-- highly irregular. It owed in large part (as Scotty will loudly and vociferously inform anyone who so much as skirts the subject) to the peculiar Vulcan 'patronage' Mr. Tucker enjoyed. It was not a bond-- _that_ dubious first is solely the purview of Dr. Amanda Grayson-- but Jim maintains that any relational transaction based on such a power imbalance can hardly be called 'friendship'.

(_'Ach!' was Montgomery Scott's disgusted response. 'I dinna care what label ye hang on it! Would that I had a Vulcan lass willin' to sign for my equipment and keep the Board o' Technological Responsibility off my back!'_)

If only Spock had taken a shine to Scotty instead, Jim thinks ruefully (ignoring the barbed and childish twist in his gut), what an awful lot of trouble they might have been saved. It's probably best they're not going back to Elba II-- knowledge that Spock had managed to compensate for the shortcomings of the X352 and mitigate the strong electromagnetic fluctuations of the Pericolosa binary would be enough to kick off a flurry of questions and a brogue-laden temper tantrum from the captive engineer.

Jim has just depressed the small, concealed button on the driver's side panel when he senses Spock come up behind him.

"Should have locked it," the prisoner chides listlessly, blandly considering the type of (entirely pointless) damage he could do if he dove for the control console now. "I hear this is a bad neighborhood." 

As if the Protectorate hasn't relegated stealing to to a largely anecdotal phenomenon. Theft due to privation is ameliorated by the constant monitoring and shifting of the Office of Resource Redistribution; pretty instances require the return of the item (or the price of said) plus ten percent compound interest for 'rental', both of which can be paid in practical service if the finances of the perpetrator are prohibitive. Those rare repeat offenders have a low-level clerical position waiting for them if they should fail to absorb the lesson after four strikes. Protectorate bureaucracy-- sprawling but monstrously efficient-- is more than willing to retrain these serial troublemakers to turn their lives in more productive directions. With a tacit cap on promotion unless they've spent at least a decade proving the beat to march to has been _thoroughly_ memorized. If one encounters a non-Vulcan in any government ministerial position, the snide joke inevitably arises (even if only in thought), 'And what did _you_ steal?' All of the aforementioned consequences are, of course, predicated on being caught and/or reported in the first place and Kirk has, in his own rare instances, always been able to work out a mutually satisfactory solution with the aggrieved, sans GOL involvement. He has the 'gift of gab'… among other things.

Shaking the hood off like an impatient horse so he can look at Spock more fully, Jim wonders if the Vulcan paid for the gear he'd 'appropriated' back at port, or if it will be tacked onto the already long list of offenses awaiting him at whatever their final destination may be. House of Surak or not, there's no way Spock can shield him from every legal implication of this latest stunt, nor does Kirk wish to accept such chains of obligation if the magistrate could. The human knows next to nothing

(_oh, but remember that warmth, that pleasurable torpor… isn't experience, after all, the best teacher?_)

about telepathic bonds, must less the specific Vulcan variety, but he does know that there's a substantial administrative faction out there that would probably love to make Spock an early widower.   
He can practically _feel_ Stonn drafting a sanction request from here. 

In the shadow of the slowly rising hatch, that same ambiguous, self-proclaimed spouse makes a stiff but gallant gesture indicating that Jim should seat himself along the two-person bench seat from the driver's side.

"The passenger hatch does not open," is his dry response to the human's dubious expression. 

"You're so cute," Jim informs him, with a sort of bleak humor which disguises genuine longing for the for the known terrain of their former interactions. Not waiting to see Spock's reaction, Kirk fairly throws himself along the firm, continuous cushion, sliding until his is sprawled with studied carelessness against the ungiving opposite door. Rith always said the pose reminded her of 'Rebel Without A Cause' and, while the raw gist of it has always been his own, subsequent study of Mr. Dean's short oeuvre had not gone amiss. Certainly it was the bane of every Minor's Housing super who'd ever tried to discuss either Kirk's questionable extracurricular activities or his 'wasted potential'. He garnishes the pose by letting his legs fall open-- his exhausted body's pathetic attempt to display interest in the telepath's erotic salvo has since abated, and the faux-hide trousers have acquired a level of filth that is actively uncomfortable. At this point, they could probably stand up by themselves.

Sparing the prisoner not a glance, the warden seats himself at a predictably perfect forty-five degree angle-- so straight the bench-back itself appears slovenly by comparison-- and provides the necessary thumbprint to activate the engine. The familiar hum of a retracting strut is followed by the coalescence of a wavering, spherical antigrav field-- this model's particular trademark. Stabilized, it holds the car-capsule suspended five feet off the ground, ready to glide effortlessly over the majority of uneven surfaces and minor obstacles. 

Though he is efficient in his brief safety check (and his insistence that Kirk make use of the seatbelt), Spock lets the transport idle longer than necessary, staring ahead with a perfect concentration that lets the human know his thoughts are truly focused within. Limned in the faint bluish glow of the console display and sunlight now thankfully filtered, Spock is objectively quite beautiful. Jim can detect traces of disorder, evidence of the long trek and their physical altercations, but only with careful study. The clean, elegant whole of this particular Vulcan-- of his attitude, bearing, and concentration-- deny minor imperfections their hold. It makes him think of the folklore his grandfather used to impart; not matters of faey or elves in the broader cultural sense, but beings of natural otherness and aristocracy. 'The Gentry'-- exquisite, wise, wild in the sense that their motivations were utterly divorced from those humanity understood. Kirk draws in a blessedly clean breath (he had not realized how much arid particulate he'd been inhaling until the car sealed itself) to say something, anything to break the silence. The words are on his tongue, variations on 'just tell me what you want', 'cut the bullshit', and 'give me something concrete that I can wrap my brain around'. 

He's stymied entirely when Spock finally turns to him, retrieving something from the console's storage without once breaking eye contact. The item retrieved is a small flask, which the Vulcan uncaps and drinks from perfunctorily. When he holds it out to Kirk, the human knows the act is a ritual one-- partaking to prove that the offering itself is safe. The briefest of heat-shimmer images presents itself-- another disorienting view of Jim Kirk in the lens of eidetic memory, aglow in the rose-lemon light of the bar as he holds a glass of water out to the supposed _Togolausu_ officer with an insulting level of deliberately formal hospitality. 

"It is _kaasa_ juice," his captor specifies. "Water…"

"On an extremely empty stomach is bad," Jim says with an ill grace that does not translate to his careful acceptance of the flask. "Believe me, I know." Spock just watches him, waiting for Kirk to put his lips where the magistrate's have just been, to complete the exchange established by _V'tosh_ warriors in the early days of the Way. Water-truce, bless his pedantic naivete. While the captive does not flinch under this scrutiny, he can still see himself reflected perfectly in those dark eyes. Oddly, it does not appeal to his vanity. 

"_Kanpai_," he says with mild sarcasm, saluting to mitigate the gravity of the moment. Spock waits until he's taken several audible swallows before shifting the transport into gear.

Jim drinks deeply, pacing himself through sheer force of will, emotionally gutted by the taste of relief and succor even as he is intellectually unsurprised by it. The _kaasa_ juice is unfamiliar, piquant and faintly reminiscent of cucumber, but the greedy elation of his body quenching this fundamental need is not. The hypos helped, but there's nothing like directly imbibing something your subconscious can recognize as nourishment. He leans back, letting the hood of the borrowed cloak cushion his head, knowing full well that-- while the drink itself was not drugged-- any satisfaction after so much hunger and thirst will act as a soforic. 

"You never proved anything, you know," he remarks idly as the identical kilometers drop away. Fumblingly, he casts what he hopes is a cypher for that morning on Risa over at Spock, like someone lobbing a grenade over a wall. 

It must work, because there is no request to clarify. "So your attitude would indicate." Unsurprisingly, Spock will not take his eyes off the terrain while piloting, so Kirk does not hesitate to rest his own. Moments pass, perhaps more than that. Time dilates with drowsiness. 

"You didn't let me see the rest of it. Proof is in the pudding."

"Perhaps another time," says a very bland version of Spock, not even bothering to harp on the illogical colloquialism. Serene, grounded-- a denial of any playfulness Jim might have imagined. Or so the voice itself conveys, a steady march over some softer, strange baroque harmony. 

"Need you to know understand else, too," Kirk tells him, feeling along the threshold of sleep. His body needs the chance to recover, recharge, but the ease of it prickles his suspicion. He mumbles, uncertain whether it is with his mouth or his mind, something to convey the move-and-countermove of this latest chase, of Spock's silent footsteps and coaxing in the fugitive's dreaming mind. He feels it now, that sensation of being cradled, shielded, so that he can rest and be safe-- though he rarely rests and does not believe in safety. Is it deliberate, or just a natural part of the bond? There is an almost imperceptible lacing of guilt… but whose? Rousing himself enough to ensure he articulates, Jim repeats in essence the same words Spock said to him after him after his eventual arrest on Risa:  
"You **cheated**."

The Vulcan's only answer-- if it can be called that, and is not solely an artifact of Kirk's somnolent mind-- is the phantom brush of lips against the human's meld-points, like a benediction. Although there is an overwhelming tenderness to the touch, gilded unapologetically with protective avarice, it cannot be denied that a deep sadness is also masked therein.

"Yes, I did." 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary/Notes:  
(All translations sourced from the [VLD](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/) unless otherwise indicated)  
[+] _sahriv oluhk_\- 'storm snake' (I made this one up out of whole cloth. Whoops.)  
[+] _Kol-Ut-Shan_\- the concept of IDIC  
[+] _ch'aal_\- a rare Vulcan plant with purple leaves, used in making tea  
[+] _Togolausu_\- enforcer  
[+] _ahkhinahr_\- the ancient training of psionic battlefield warriors  
[+] _v'ree'lat_\- 'searching/sorting' to clear the mind, a stage of meditation  
[+] _tvi-bezhun-wein_\- the inner or nictating membrane covering the Vulcan eye to protect the eye from sun or sand.  
[+] _maut-klonik_\- brilliant, intellectually impressive  
[+] _vaksurik_\- beautiful  
[+] _t'nash-veh-ka_\- my equal  
[+] _k'hat'n'dlawa_ half of each other's heart & soul  
[+] _t'nash-veh teslu_\- my bonded  
[+] _k'shatri-ashayam_\- foreign beloved  
[+] _kaasa_\- a blue-green fruit  
[+] _kanpai_\- (Japanese) cheers; lit, 'empty the cup' 
> 
> Thank you so much for taking the time to read my work! If I could bother you just a bit more to leave kudos or comment, I would really appreciate it. I always enjoy hearing what you think! <3


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